Dynamic ontology supported user interface for personalized decision support

Abstract

European citizens are increasingly aware of the influence of air quality and weather on their health and quality of life. At the same time, more environmental information is freely available through a plethora of websites, dedicated portals, and web services. In order to exploit these data for personal decisions one has to identify, retrieve, and combine the information that is relevant to one's personal situation, planned activity, and information need. Often, this task is hindered by different data formats, display styles and data resolutions. The PESCaDO system is a web-based decision support system addressing this issue. The inquiry to the system, as well as the system's result, can cover a broad range of environmental aspects and personal situations and is therefore quite complex. In this work we present a novel approach on how the system can actively assist users in all steps of the decision making process, especially by enhancing the user interaction. This approach combines an intelligent dialog steering method based on analyzing the domain ontology with flexible, dynamic data visualizations for a situation depending orchestration of data sources. Both aspects have been evaluated in on-line user studies, as well as with an expert evaluation of the whole system.