The Semantic Combining for Exploration of Environmental and Disease Data Dashboard for Clinician Researchers

Abstract

While Semantic Web technologies facilitate the integration of heterogeneous data sources through the Resource Description Frame-work (RDF) and ontologies, they present an obstacle for non-technical researchers who want to access and explore the data to meet their needs.To address this problem, visual tools and analytical platforms with a user-centred approach are an emerging solution. This paper outlines the design of a dashboard called Semantic Combining for Exploration of Environmental and Disease data (SCEED), an initial visual tool designed for use by clinician researchers to explore and retrieve combined environ-mental and disease data for further analysis. The evaluation of SCEEDconsists of a combination of standard usability and effectiveness meth-ods, using the AVERT project as a case study. In the AVERT project,clinician researchers need to address the challenges of querying specific vasculitis flare clinical data for a particular patient to retrieve linked environmental data from a triplestore, and downloading the chosen data as input for their statistical models. The initial evaluation has concluded that the SCEED dashboard is an adequate initial design to fulfil, and points towards an interface to engage clinician researchers directly with Linked Data. Furthermore, this paper helps to highlight the difficulty of conducting usability evaluations with small sample sizes and how evaluation metrics can be combined to assess the requirements for developing an effective tool.