A User Interface for Semantic Competence Profiles

This paper by Martin Hochmeister & Johannes Daxböck was presented at the User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization conference in Girona/Spain in 07/2011.

Abstract

Competence management systems are increasingly based on ontologies representing competences within a certain domain. Most of these systems represent a user’s competence profile by means of an ontological structure. Such semantic competence profiles, often structured as a hierarchy of competences, are difficult to navigate for self-assessment purposes. The more competences a user profile holds, the more challenging the comprehensive presentation of profile data is. In this paper, we present an integrated user interface that supports users during competence self-assessment and facilitates a clear presentation of their semantic competence profiles. For evaluation, we conducted a usability study with 19 students at university. The results show that users were mostly satisfied with the usability of the interface that also represents a promising approach for efficient competence self-assessment.

The code and the web application below only contains the user interface experiments stripped of the user management part.

Materials & Links

PDF | Source | Website | Citation

A user interface for semantic competence profiles
Hochmeister, M. and Daxböck, J.
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference (UMAP) (2011),
Vol. 6787 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, pp. 159-170

A preview of the next iteration of the user interface using a radial tree layout (likely never to be finished ಠ_ಠ):