Evaluating the usability of a semantic environmental health data framework: Approach and study

Abstract

Environmental exposures transported across air, land and water can affect our health making us more susceptible to developing a disease. Therefore, researchers need to face the complex task of integrating environmental exposures and linking them to health events with the relevant spatiotemporal and health context for individuals or populations. We present a usability evaluation approach and study of a semantic framework (i.e. Knowledge Graph, Methodology and User Interface) to enable Health Data Researchers (HDR) to link particular health events with environmental data for rare disease research. The usability study includes 17 HDRs with expertise in health data related to Anti-Neutrophil Cytoplasmic Antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis (AAV) in Ireland and Kawasaki Disease in Japan, and with no previous practical experience in using Semantic Web (SW) technologies. The evaluation results are promising in that they indicate that the framework is useful in allowing researchers themselves to link health and environmental data whilst hiding the complexities of SW technologies. As a result of this work, we also discuss the limitations of the approach together with the applicability to other domains. Beyond the direct impact on environmental health studies, the description of the evaluation approach can guide researchers in making SW technologies more accessible to domain experts through usability studies.

Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV) - Version 2

“…DPV's outputs were also used to model access and usage control policies [12,10,16,82], and in particular applied to Solid [20,25,14,13,30,3,19] and health data-sharing use cases [78,61], as well as to describe consent records and contracts for sensor data [49,50]. In the context of data spaces, DPV was used to provide descriptions of health data handling activities [40] and to create user-centric privacy interfaces [36,56,31].…”