Towards a Usability Ontology

This looks quite interesting. A usability ontology workshop. I like it because I’m into ontologies and have been working an ontology for studying transmedia forms. My ontology is proposed under my framework: transmodiology. I’ve been working on this myself because, frankly, not many researchers and practitioners have got to the point where they realise the need for it. I see the need for it because what we’re describing is beyond extant terminology. At present, most terms and descriptions of things are mono-media or mono-time based. They are also have game or narrative slants. Transmedia forms traverse many art types, a so-called ‘story’ can continue in a ‘game’. So what is it that is continuing? Is it a story or a game or something else? These are the sort of issues that are important in transmodiology. So, it seems I’ll have to wait until the area gets really cluttered with inter-disciplinary confusion for a workshop to happen. I can’t wait!! So, in the meantime, check out this really interesting model: 

“Creating a Usability Ontology” workshop, at the Usability Professionals’
Association (UPA) conference. Monday, June 11, 2007, Austin, TX, USA. More details on the workshop description page: http://www.ipgems.com/content/usability_ontology_upa2007.html.

Developing a sharable, reusable ontology for our domain(s) is an idea whose time has come. There is an increasing need to organize resources consistently, as well as the need to support cross-reference between concepts and across disciplines. Increasingly, categorization and metadata are appearing in all aspects of user experience, and so using these tools internally is valuable.

This workshop will create an initial ontology to cover the broad territory of HCI, usability, UCD, ID, and user experience. The initial ontology that we create must be robust enough to cover the breadth of our professional field, but simple enough to be useful. It must contain language that is recognized by practitioners, academics, and ideally by people from related disciplines. It needs to be able to grow collaboratively over time. The long-term goal is to begin framing something that can be shared by publishers, resource sites, tagging sites, community forums, and even used within organizations by usability/design practitioners who create references for use by others.

The workshop will be held on June 11th 2007, in conjunction with the UPA 2007 conference in Austin, TX
(http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/conference/2007/program/index.html).