Information Modeling Interview Protocol

As we develop draft and final models, we will be validating them with the domain scientists who are collaborators on our grant. The purpose of this validation is four-fold:

1. Assure face validity and scientific relevance of the models themselves
2. Prioritize information extraction targets by identifying "most wanted" elements
3. Identify value proposition by determining elements most difficult to obtain from structured data.
4. Align the semantic model with the scientific "mental model". This will make downstream aspects of the software (including the visualization) more organic and presumably easier to accept.

Our goal is thus to ask each of our three domain experts the following:

Based on their specific scientific needs,

1. Review our existing model attributes and constraints/value sets, and prioritize them
2. Identify missing model attributes and constraints/value sets which will be added to the models
3. Identify the attributes that are hardest to obtain from existing (mainly structured) data sources
4. Determine which relationships are most important to represent
5. Enumerate values within value sets

We propose to use a card sort task to accomplish this.

Materials

• Index cards with printed labels. Each card will have the attribute and a set of values (in lieu of a definition)
• Colored Markers to write categories on cards after the sorts
• Extra blank index cards
• Script
• Audio recorder