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User Interaction with the Semantic Web
It has become more practical, and also more beneficial, to build semantically-enabled applications.
The Semantic Web offers opportunities to achieve designs that require strong context (i.e. knowledge of the user
and situation), integration of information, and most of all a key focus on the user. This is what first drew our
interest in 2001. Since 2004, we have been collecting examples of current innovations related to user interaction/design
for the Semantic Web.
This page serves as a reference for usability/design practitioners, developers, and project leaders as you
explore the subject and consider the role of Semantic Web opportunities and offerings in your work.
To help get oriented, you can view the latest presentation slides (June 2008)
from the Usability Professionals' Association conference, and others from
Computer Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI), May 2007 (pdf).
Examples and interesting web sites are listed further down the page.
At the same time as the Semantic Web becomes more practical for interaction designers, academics and practitioners
from the Semantic Web community are seeking the involvement of usability professionals to continue defining the
"next generation web." Workshops and papers at most conferences have increasingly focused on user needs and user interaction.
This page includes:
Background
The Semantic Web has been defined as "an extension of the current web in which information
is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to
work in cooperation" (Tim
Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila in Scientific American, 2001).
The tools for the "next generation web" are becoming available now and will be increasingly used
by web developers, so it is important for user-centered designers and usability
professionals to understand what is coming into greater use.
If we think of the challenges and limitations we have when designing currently to meet user
needs, then it appears that the Semantic Web is dangling some enticing carrots
in front of us:
- Greater user context available to make application/site behavior more user-centered
- More flexible and adaptive language parsing and "understanding" to make the conversation with the
computer more effective
- Better visualizations and representations of complex data and interactions
- Availability of agents that can manage routine background tasks and reduce the need for users
to hunt and search among thousands, millions, or billions of items of
information without adequate support
- Sharable ontologies and vocabularies, allowing all the applications and sites that a user sees to
speak a "similar language" and reducing the demand on the user to interpret
language when trying to complete a task that requires more than one site or
application at a time
- Logical inferencing that can help synthesize information from disparate sources,
compare and organize that information, then present it to the user in a more
seamless way, reducing the cognitive burden
While it entices us, it also challenges us to consider where and how "semantic enabling" user
interactions can facilitate increased usability of the web and software
applications. It challenges us to consider the risks and complications that
arise from these technologies, and the role we need to play as user advocates
and representatives in the ongoing development of these technologies. Some of
these challenges are explored in further detail in our 2004 paper: the
Usability Imperative Inherent in the Semantic Web.
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Where to focus? Interaction challenges for the Semantic Web
Below are some broad categories of challenges that need both
research and practice input from the usability community. A growing list of
challenges is being developed by the Semantic Web User Interaction (SWUI) community.
Refer to the SWUI web site for current information.
Context:
-
Capturing context in a simple, usable, yet rich way -- ideally, as
a by-product of other activities
- Identifying how simple can we make
it for applications to understand a user’s specific context
Process:
-
Involving the user throughout analysis and design, as well as
during evaluation
- Refining user-centered methods to support design of richer
contextual/personal applications
Navigation, views, and data interpretation:
-
Scalability
- Focusing on the relationships (the lines) in visualizations,
representations, and queries
- Maintaining ontologies -- language evolution, collaboration, relationships, rules
Authority and permission:
- Interacting with agents -- defining your relationship with them,
answering their questions, communicating changes
- Avoiding "pestering" while maintaining oversight
- Understanding trust, privacy
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Questions for the usability community to consider
- What aspects of the Semantic Web
have an interface? Even if there is no interface, what are the interactions?
- How can we be sure our interactions with data capture/management tools are so easy that anyone can --
and would -- describe themselves and the associated context?
- How do users and technologies work
together to build the semantic connections? How are they expanded and enhanced
when users collaborate with each other electronically? How are old connections
removed?
- How will seeking and reasoning
applications be forgiving of differences in language and meaning, and be clear/respectful
of semantic ‘shades of gray’?
- How do users remain (and feel) in
control, when so much is going on ‘behind the curtain’?
- The more that applications are
built from shared, distributed components, how much harder is it to shape the overall
user experience?
- What are the fundamental
implications of things like agents, reasoning engines, component technologies
and web services - building blocks for web-based applications and interfaces?
- How are user personas,
preferences, experiences and interests modeled? Once these connections are
built, then how are they changed as the user’s expectations and needs change?
- How can we create better-managed
semantic environments to help us avoid drowning in the ocean of metadata?
- How does a user’s interaction with
an application help filter out the myriad of possibilities, hone in on what is
relevant, and make sure that the interpretations being made in the background
are suitable to a particular situation that day, and not a situation faced last
week or last month?
- How much of this can be done
without requiring many hours of my time informing my machines/appliances of my
desires, circumstances and vocabulary preferences?
- What interactions are required so
that semantics can support online conversations and interactions? Can semantic
technologies enable person-to-person and group interaction, and make the idea
of online community more practical? What facilities are required to make that
easier?
-
How do we keep the language from becoming stale - or, put another
way, how do we maintain the Semantic Web?
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Workshops and resources
The SWUI project page and the SWUI wiki, with discussion topics, studies, and ongoing collaborations.
Mailing list for SWUI discussion: public-semweb-ui@w3.org. (list archive is available on the web)
Semantic Web User Interaction workshop series:
- Sixth SWUI Workshop at ISWC 2009. See the workshop home page and the
proceedings.
- Fifth SWUI Workshop at CHI 2008. See the workshop home page and the
proceedings.
- Fourth SWUI Workshop, by invitation, at MIT and University of Zurich, 2007.
- Third SWUI Workshop at ISWC 2006. See the workshop description and notes and the
available papers and posters. Held in conjunction with ISWC2006. Athens, GA, USA. November 6, 2006.
- Second SWUI Workshop at ISWC 2005. See the workshop description and the
proceedings. Held in conjunction with the
4th International Semantic Web Conference, Galway, Ireland. November 7, 2005.
- First SWUI Workshop at WWW 2004. See Beyond the Click: Interaction Design and the Semantic Web,
held in conjunction with the World Wide Web Conference 2004, NY, NY. May 18, 2004.
Additional references:
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Examples and Applications
The applications list was getting too out of date... so until I get it updated, I recommend going through my most recent guided tour presentation, as it contains most of the currently links that I use as a reference for my design conversations: A Glimpse into the Present of Semantic Web Interaction (June 2008).
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