Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Notational Standards
discussion à
The Roadmap for Semantic
technology adoption à
The next generation knowledge tools
(on recognizing response degeneracy, or singularity,
in the function to structure determination)
CALL FOR PAPERS ===============
Second International Workshop on Interaction Design and the
Semantic Web) held in conjunction with the 4th International Semantic Web
Conference, Galway, Ireland. Workshop Date: November 7, 2005.
http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/ddis/iswc2005ws.html
This announcement
includes:
* Workshop goals, content, and format
* Paper submission instructions and key dates
* Organizers and program review committee
* Information on the first international workshop
Workshop Goals
--------------
How do we bring the power of the semantic web to end-users? If
exploited effectively, the rich markup and processing of information promised
by the semantic web can provide much more power available to meet user needs.
However, if the semantic web is to be valuable to users (rather than being
confined to computer-to-computer interaction) its benefits have to be made
tangible through the quality of the interaction.
The semantic web is proving to be an integration point for many
different disciplines. This workshop will bring together experts -- both
practitioners and researchers -- from the semantic web, human-computer
interaction, human language technologies, information visualization,
information retrieval, and knowledge-based systems communities. We will share
research and insights, and explore future potential.
Workshop Technical Content --------------------------
Contributions will present state-of-the-art end user interaction
techniques and make concrete suggestions on how such techniques could be used
or modified to suit the semantic web. Specifically, through presented papers
and lively discussion, the workshop hopes to address:
The state of the art of end user interaction with the semantic web
* What effective or novel interaction methods are beginning to
appear?
* What (if at all) is the difference between other areas of
user-interaction with knowledge intensive sources and the semantic web?
* What other areas of research can inform semantic web user
interface design? This question is particularly important as there is a long
tradition of designing user interfaces that interact with large data/knowledge
bases or document collections in many research areas (e.g., information
retrieval, information visualization, natural language processing, user
modeling, multimodal interfaces, to name just a few).
How a semantically-enabled site/application should behave
* How to expose assumptions, meanings and relationships in a
non-cluttering way?
* How to reduce noise while improving user preference-setting and
adaptability?
* What does giving "trust" mean for users when enabling
semi-autonomous agents?
* How can we provide a smooth transition from traditional to
semantically enabled sites/applications?
The major challenges to the introduction of tools for the semantic
web
* How can we enable and encourage authors and end-users to mark up
their content? (The markup prisoners dilemma -- if the people who do the markup
are not going to benefit from it they are unlikely to do it -- is a phenomenon
heavily researched in CSCW.)
* Is it possible to hide semantically-rich markup "under the
covers" (as has been happening increasingly with traditional web tools)
and still retain integrity in meanings, relationships and rules?
* How can semantic data be maintained so inference logic and
meaning can remain relevant to people who rely on it? What tools are needed to
effectively support development of complex ontologies and rules?
These questions are particularly pressing as the growing number of
semantic web applications is revealing new challenges for user interaction
design. These challenges include designing effective ways of presenting the new
kinds of results that semantic web applications are capable of generating and
new ways of representing user interaction options that do not overwhelm users
with the complexity found in the underlying logic-based implementations. Users
have traditionally been quick to reject applications that are burdensome, confusing,
or cause a lack of confidence in their behavior.
The rise in popularity and active use of the web has clearly shown
the importance of good, usable interfaces. Consequently, it should be a central
goal of the semantic web community to increase the user base (and thus the
semantic connections/richness available), and this calls for methods to present
the logical content, inferences, and increased functionality of the semantic
web in ways that provide value and a positive experience for end-users.