NYC SemWeb MeetupMarch 2010 Duane Degler www.designforcontext.com duane@designforcontext.com Semantic Web concepts and technologies have arrived ! But... How to incorporate them into the user experience ? Posted on the web, so relax and enjoy

DesignForSemanticWeb.com

Tim Berners-Lee's 2010 TED talk Linked Data Freebase Data.gov and Data.gov.uk City government: NYC Data Mine, DC data public square Apps for Democracy NY Times topics World Bank Amazon's >1Tb Wikipedia and DBpedia

2009: http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html, 11:00 "After 10+ years of work into various aspects of the Semantic Web...
I am now fully convinced (read: no longer in denial) that most of the remaining challenges to realize the Semantic Web vision have nothing to do with the underlying technologies...
Instead, it all comes down to user interfaces and usability."Ora Lassila, "Semantic Web Soul Searching"
Wilbur-and-O blog, March 19, 2007
http://www.lassila.org/blog/archive/2007/03/semantic_web_so_1.html

Subject > Predicate (the name of the line) > Object Is it the Data Web? Open Linked Data Lots of structured data More common syntax More self-describing Models that represent data domains Increasing number of tools for data display, translation and manipulation Plenty of enthusiasm Contextual, e.g. PLUM Mobile and location-aware, e.g. Siri, Wikitude, even Google Search Nearby Situated, e.g. Chumby, Violet, Rabbit, et al, also W3C Semantic Sensor Incubator, Wikipedia Semantic Sensor Web Gestural, e.g. MS Surface or smart phones; see Wikipedia gesture recognition The Context Web Personal Managed and scalable Social Mobile and location-aware Temporal Situated - sensors and the "Internet of Things" Multi-modal - gesture, voice, haptic, etc. "As interface stands on the shoulders of infrastructure, tomorrow's user experience will rest on the foundation of today's Semantic Web technologies."Peter Morville, Ambient Findability, 2005, p. 170

Daniel Tunkelang: Faceted Search Marti Hearst: Search User Interfaces and Flamenco Peter Morville and Jeff Callender: Search Patterns There are two types of interaction: Refinement is about starting with large sets and narrowing... a relevance funnel Browsing is about exploring the structure of data to find areas of interest Add semantic relationships - complexity, yet potential elegance Zappos (flat, reordering) Amazon (hierarchy) eBay (layered) Smithsonian (query) based on Solr Exhibit (lightweight) Drawn from instance data Not often leveraging metadata relationships (if they exist)

Delicious (user-generated) Flamenco (flexible, simple) Relation Browser (linear) Aqua Browser (multi-modal) Along with refinement, visualize relationships between elements (can be explicit or derived)

mSpace (relating) and mSpace Mobile Parallax browser (path-centered) Flexible - add new data types and relationships any time Expose relationships for greater user control

mSpace and mSpace Mobile

What if the interface could be more adaptive? Responding to: Quantity of data Attributes of data and user's interactions Available and new predicate relationships it could leverage User-provided parameters and structures Context

ecoResearch Just because the data is a graph, does not always mean graphs are a good choice for interaction

debategraph.org Clear structural relationships Framework - community creates the content Automatic rendering of visual relationships view Object types are identified (color), but relationships not uniquely typed

Tag Galaxy and the recent OpenText Vizible HCIL (LifeLines, FeatureLens, etc.) NY Times (Shan Carter) casualties, voting, word clusters, unemployment MS Pivot (based on SeaDragon), Gary Flake video IBM Many Eyes GapMinder.com (Hans Rosling - see TED talks) Google Insights Jonathan Harris (artist/designer, known for We Feel Fine) Linked Data is an engine Many styles of visualization interactions, e.g. Flat X : Y charting Scalable / zoomable views Overlays Parameter-filtered views Swappable data parameters Marking key points that link to outside references As I watch visualization interfaces mature over time, I see a trend:
Expose controls for the user

Swotti, video WolframAlpha Factual Trust (in human terms) must be earned through user experience, as it does with every technology shift Where did this data come from? How fresh is it? What manipulations have been done? By whom? " The problem with data is that it's dead. We should bring it to life by thinking through all its relationships - both with other data and with the circumstances in the world that it's supposed to represent. "Phil Agre, "Living Data", Wired 2.11, Nov 1994 Inference Web Tabulator So the data is available and visible... what about the concepts and interpretations? The logic in ontologies means "indirect" connections between question and answer Transparency: "How did you arrive at that answer?" Facebook, Google Buzz FourSquare, Twitter, and PleaseRobMe Paul Shabajee: Informed Consent on the Semantic Web Building on the strengths of Web 2.0 Stronger relationships... between each other... between our data "selves" How do we know what we've given permission for? In future, we're not just giving permission for data... we could empower agents with responsiblity for action on our behalf

Paul Shabajee, University of Bristol & HP Labs, UK, 2006

“ Of course, having semi-autonomous agents roaming the Web doing things that the user may only be dimly aware of (if at all) is a frightening prospect…

The interaction designers who will be involved in creating these agents will also have to design the means for users to supervise and control their agents. This is a design challenge still waiting to be fully explored. ” Dan Saffer, designing for interaction, 2007, p.203

" One proposal is to make every last hunk of computerized data its own intelligent software agent, storing information about itself and exchanging a stream of messages with all other relevant data.

Having done that, we'd then have to redefine the other basic concepts of computing so that those millions of operations per second compute something meaningful - not just something that looks good. "Phil Agre, "Living Data", Wired 2.11, Nov 1994 Other user interaction models and designs that are emerging Data entry and quality management Vocabulary creation, integration, sense-making, and use in design Social Semantic Web Personal and social implications and challenges In the meantime:
DesignForSemanticWeb.com
Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco (check out my tutorial on June 22nd).