Portal Design for the Open Data Initiative: A Preliminary Study

The Open Data Initiative (ODI) has been previously proposed to facilitate the sharing of annotated datasets within the pervasive health care research community. This paper outlines the requirements for the ODI portal based on the ontological data model of the ODI and its typical usage scenarios. In the context of an action research framework, the paper outlines the ODI platform, the design of a prototype user interface for the purposes of initial evaluation and its technical review by third-party researchers (n=3). The main findings from the technical review were found to be the need for a more flexible user interface to reflect the different experimental configurations in the research community, provision for describing dataset usage, and dissemination conditions. The technical review also identified the value of permitting datasets with variable quality, as noisy datasets are useful in the testing of activity recognition algorithms. Revisions to the ODI ontology and platform are proposed based on the findings from this study.