Tumbling to Succeed: A Predictive Analysis of User Success in Interactive Ontology Visualization

Ontology visualization is an important component in the support of human-ontology interaction, as it amplifies cognition and offloads cognitive efforts to the human perceptual system. While a significant amount of research efforts has focused on designing and developing various visual layouts and improve performance of large-scale visualizations, the differences in user preferences and cognitive abilities have been largely overlooked. This provides an opportunity to investigate ways to potentially provide more personalized visual support in human-ontology interaction. To this end, this paper demonstrates successful predictions on an individual user's likelihood to succeed in a given task, based on this person's gaze data collected during interaction. Specifically, we show several statistically significant predictions against a baseline classifier when inferring users' success before a given task is actually completed. Moreover, we present results showing that accurate predictions of user success can be achieved early on during user interaction, such as after just a few minutes in some cases. These findings suggest there are ample opportunities throughout various stages of human-ontology interaction where the underlying visual system may adapt in real time to the user's visual needs to provide the most appropriate visualization with the overall goal of possibly increasing user success in a given task.