An ontology-based semantic design of the survey questionnaires

Questionnaire is the most common tool of data collection for the purposes of either assessment of the trend of observed parameter of the individual, or statistical survey. Due to the prevalence of mobile devices, the cost of questionnaire-based data gathering from the respondents became extremely low, and thus, collecting of the information can be easily reiterated, providing the deep insight of the studied phenomenon. From the other hand, regular questionnaire-based data collection inevitably leads to the significant growth of the recorded information and to the necessity of automatic processing, e.g., the reasoning on the data to take a decisions. In this paper, the generic ontology for representing questionnaires in machine-readable form is proposed. The presented ontology is intended to use in decision support systems and in personalized smart environments.