1. Applying visualization
techniques to develop
interfaces for educational
repositories: the case of
Organic.Lingua and VOA3R
David Martin-Moncunill, Salvador Sánchez, Alonso Paulo A. Gaona García, Nikolaos Marianos

2. Motivation
 Most educational digital repositories include a
knowledge classification scheme.
 The idea of using a visual interface to show and
navigate through these schemas, sounds promising.
 Several digital repositories have implemented or are
considering to implement one.
 This would require a big implementation effort 
evaluate before starting to work.

3. Case Studies: Organic.Edunet &
Organic.Lingua
 Organic.Edunet: a
multilingual federation of
learning repositories about
Organic Agriculture and
Agroecology.
 Agrovoc thesaurus used
for knowledge
representation.
 Organic.Lingua: improve
Organic.Edunet portal with
advanced language
services.

4. Case Studies: Organic.Edunet & Organic
Lingua Experiments
 OE: In-depth usability study involving different user profiles (2011).
 Heuristic Analysis, thinking aloud protocol, interviews, benchmarks, focus groups,
questionnaires.
 OL: Pilot & Usability trials, Starting January 2013. Spanish Society for Ecological
Agriculture.
 Not included in the paper: France (March 2013- domain experts), Spain (April 2013 – IT
profile), UK (April 2013 – General Public)

5. Case Studies: VOA3R
 Facilitate the open sharing of scientific and scholarly research publications
and outcomes related to agriculture, aquaculture, food and environment.
 Agrovoc thesaurus used for knowledge representation.
 “Drag & Drop” interface to navigate and search.

6. Case Studies: VOA3R Experiments
 Information gathered from VOA3R pilot & validation trials (>20).
 Usability techniques such as thinking aloud, interviews or cognitive
walkthroughs.
 These results are described and published as part of the project
deliverables.

7. Case Studies: Usability study of taxonomy-
visualization user interfaces in digital repositories
 In-depth study for the analysis of the perception and interaction levels.
 Obtain conclusions that would ultimately lead to development decisions and the
adaptation of user interfaces. (To be published)
 The experiment analised the thematic-coverage of the Europeana digital library,
according to a mature and well known taxonomic structure the AAT thesaurus.

8. Results
 Several usability problems were found for each visual interface.

9. Results (II)
 Three key problems beyond the visual
interfaces’ usability:
Utility -What are the benefits of
using these kind of interfaces?
Learnability - Will I have to learn
how to use the interfaces & basics
of KOS?
KOS Usability – I don’t understand
the classification scheme!
Utility
KOS
Usability
Learnability

10. Conclusions
 Visualization techniques could be a very helpful tool for learning /
educational repositories using KOS.
 To reach this goal an important effort on the usability side must be
done .
 There are 3 key problems that prevent users from widely adopting
them.
 Making efforts trying to solve other usability problems in an
implemented interface will most probably be useless if these key
problems are not solved first.

11. THANKS!
David Martin-Moncunill (d.martin@edu.uah.es )
Salvador Sánchez Alonso (salvador.sanchez@uah.es )
Computer Science Department, University of Alcalá, Spain.
Paulo A. Gaona García (pagaonag@udistrital.edu.co )
Faculty of Engineering, Distrital University, Colombia.
Nikolaos Marianos (n.marianos@chios.aegean.gr )
Department of Shipping Trade and Transport, University of the Aegean,
Greece