Vidar Klungre, has started a SIRIUS project at the University of Oslo. The goal of his project is to analyse and improve the usability of the Optique Visual Query System (OptiqueVQS), and similar systems developed within SIRIUS in the future. OptiqueVQS is an ontology-based visual query system, which allows end-users to easily query for data within their company. It is built as a part of EU- funded Optique Project, but will be extended also after Optique is completer in November 2016.

More specifically, Vidar will work on the following problems:

P1: Adapt interface suggestions based on ontology and data. The goal of this problem is to improve the suggestions given by the OptiqueVQS even further, by looking at the underlying data. Currently the system only takes the ontology into account, but a good query system should also give suggestions based on the underlying data. The usefulness of exploiting the underlying data in the user interface is inspired by techniques found in standard faceted search systems.

P2: Investigate the relation between subconcepts and attributes. To the end-users, it is not always obvious whether a subconcept is modelled by using ontology suconcepts, or specific attributes. Currently the user interface mirrors the ontology, so the user has to adapt to underlying model, which may contradict with his own model of the domain.

P3: Add query support for multiple attribute values. Currently the OptiqueVQS only supports one filter per attribute, but end-users may want to query for more.