Real-world semantic or knowledge-based systems, e.g., in the biomedical domain, can become large and complex. Tool support for the localization and repair of faults within knowledge bases of such systems can therefore be essential for their practical success. Correspondingly, a number of knowledge base debugging approaches, in particular for ontology-based systems, were proposed throughout recent years. Query-based debugging is a comparably recent interactive approach that localizes the true cause of an observed problem by asking knowledge engineers a series of questions. Concrete implementations of this approach exist, such as the OntoDebug plug-in for the ontology editor Prot\'eg\'e. To validate that a newly proposed method is favorable over an existing one, researchers often rely on simulation-based comparisons. Such an evaluation approach however has certain limitations and often cannot fully inform us about a method's true usefulness. We therefore conducted different user studies to assess the practical value of query-based ontology debugging. One main insight from the studies is that the considered interactive approach is indeed more efficient than an alternative algorithmic debugging based on test cases. We also observed that users frequently made errors in the process, which highlights the importance of a careful design of the queries that users need to answer.

翻译：现实世界的语义学或基于知识的系统,例如生物医学领域的系统,可能变得巨大而复杂。因此,支持这类系统知识基础中的缺陷定位和修复的工具支持对于这些系统的实际成功可能至关重要。相应的是,近年来提出了一些知识基础解错方法,特别是基于本体学的系统。基于查询的调试是一种可比较的近期互动方法,它通过向知识工程师提出一系列问题,将观察到问题的真正原因本地化。这一方法的具体实施是存在的,例如对本体学编辑 Prot\'e\e的 OntoDebug 插件。为了证实新提议的方法优于现有的方法,研究人员往往依靠模拟的比较。但这种评价方法有一定的局限性,往往不能使我们充分了解一种方法的真正有用性。因此,我们进行了不同的用户研究,以评估基于查询的调试错误的实际价值。从研究中得出的一个主要见解是,即考虑的交互式方法确实比基于替代的解算方法的用户更有效率,而我们也需要根据其他的解算方法的答案来测试。