Table 1 Summary of prior research

Speroni [15]

Introduced the concept of ontology and propose seven ontologies for information intensive websites

Speroni et al. [14]

Conducted an expert inspection based on Speroni’s [15] set of ontologies in order to evaluate the web interfaces

Bolchini et al. [10]

Proposed a few heuristics to design and evaluate web interface signs grounded on Speroni’s [15] ontology

Islam et al. [12]

Analysed the interface signs to explore users’ perceived difficulty in interpreting the meaning of interface signs that belong to different ontologies

Sharp [28]

Described the importance of ontologies in information systems development based on Speroni’s [15] work

Islam [29]

Analysed how re-design changes the ontology referred to by an interface sign; and users’ difficulty in interpreting the meaning of interface signs based on Speroni’s [15] work