Lately I’ve been spending more time delving into some analysis of the changes being made to different ontologies by different editors and less time coding my change analysis plugin. One specific thing I have been investigating is how many times multiple editors actually modify the same artifact in an ontology and within that set, is there anything interesting going on with those potentially conflicting changes?
For the programmers possibly reading this, you can think of the ontology as a software project. The artifacts of interest would be individual files.
So far, in the three projects I’ve looked at, two of the three have very few multiple editors making changes to a single term. Unfortunately, I don’t really have enough data to say anything conclusive yet about this observation. Once I have a longer history for a project, I’d like to see if is the general case. Also, I’d like to investigate what kind of roles people take on as editors. It would also be interesting to see what terms stabilize, with regard to their edits, over time, while I suspect others will perhaps be in constant evolution.
During my initial analysis, I did come up with another feature for my plugin. While using the concept change analysis view that I talked about in my last post, I found sometimes I wished I could see the global impact that a single author or a set of authors had.
To support this, I added a filter configuration dialog, which allows the user to filter the concept change tree to display only changes by certain authors or between certain date ranges. The date range feature will be very nice down the road when I have a longer history of changes. I’ll be able to see where edits are taking place for specific time periods. I think, like software development, there will most likely be “hot spots” for changes over short periods of time.
Below is an example of applying the author filter. The first image shows the filter dialog where I’ve chosen two authors to be filtered. Once I apply the filter, all changes by these authors will be hidden and the change counts in the tree will update. The two side by side images show the before and after screenshots of the concept change view. As you can see when you compare the change counts in the tree between the two views, the two authors that are filtered are responsible for HUGE amount of changes in comparison to the others.
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