In this paper we present an experiment which has been performed to validate a pragmatic-based, expert-based and basic-level ontology. These ontologies were created for use in an application which generates questions for ordinary people with the purpose to determine a crisis situation. All three ontologies have specific characteristics related to their method of creation. This experiment shows that using the basic-level ontology results in the fastest and least ambiguous determination of a crisis situation.
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Using an ontology to automatically generate questions for ordinary people requires a structure and concepts com- pliant with human thought. Here we present methods to develop a pragmatic, expert-based and a basic-level ontology and a framework to evaluate these ontologies. Comparing these ontologies shows that expert-based ontologies are most easy to con- struct but lack required cognitive semantic characteristics. Basic-level ontologies have structure and concepts which are better in terms of cognitive semantics but are most expensive to construct.
In this paper we present a system that generates questions from an ontology to determine a crisis situation by ordinary people using their mobile phone: the Situation Awareness Question Generator. To generate questions from an ontology we propose a formalization based on Situation Theory and several strategies to determine a situation as quickly as possible. A suitable ontology should comply with human categorization to enhance trustworthiness. We created three ontologies, i.e. a pragmatic-based ontology, an expert-based ontology and a basiclevel ontology. Several experiments, published elsewhere, showed that the basic-level ontology is most suitable.
