SemanticWebUsability

State of the Art (SOTA) in Usability and CHI/HCI research of Semantic Web applications.

Someone please add facetted browsing and remove this sentence.

Abraham Bernstein on four interaction metaphors
http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/ pretty SOTA w.r.t. UI

A lot of info from Duane Dengler

This stuff should be edited by a gardener....

Dunked here by Leo Sauermann, originally from http://www.w3.org/mid/20080903064738.83A71D4001@mail.itcinternet.net

I would suggest that notes/outcomes from your workshop are captured into the SWUI wiki, so our collective discussions are more easily connected. Alongside the wiki is also the SWUI workshop archive: http://swui.webscience.org/

First, SWUI/usability may or may not be 'notional.' To meet the real needs of users with a formative technology, we have to consider the Process challenge as much - or more - than the interaction technology or 'guidelines' challenge. Core usability and interaction design processes are an important starting point, not yet well adopted in the relevant communities. Do we need to re-invent that wheel? Also, you might want to take a look at page 13 of "The Usability Imperative Inherent in the Semantic Web" (2004), http://www.designforcontext.com/publications/dd_usability-in-semweb_20040610 .pdf. While now fairly old, a lot of the goals and questions remain relevant for consideration when measuring the state of the art.

How do we understand and articulate people's goals and tasks in a way that helps us identify the unique capabilities of the medium to respond? The third SWUI workshop in 2006 was particularly rich in discussion of that question. Unfortunately, we don't have a recording of the panel discussion (a clear call-to-arms from Tim Berners-Lee, Nigel Shadbolt, Jim Hendler, and David Karger, as well as Wendy Hall), but we do have papers from that workshop focused on assessing usable design questions in particular. Battle, "Preliminary Analysis of Users and Tasks for the Semantic Web," http://www.designforcontext.com/publications/lb_users_tasks_semantic_web.pdf schraefel and Karger, "The Pathetic Fallacy of RDF," http://swui.semanticweb.org/swui06/papers/Karger/Pathetic_Fallacy.html Heath, Domingue, Shabajee, "User Interaction and Uptake Challenges to Successfully Deploying Semantic Web Technologies," http://swui.semanticweb.org/swui06/papers/Heath/Heath.pdf Downey, "Designing Annotation Mechanisms with Users in Mind: A Paper Prototyping Case Study from the Scientific Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) Project," http://swui.semanticweb.org/swui06/papers/Downey/Downey.pdf Wilson and schraefel, "mSpace: What do Numbers and Totals Mean in a Flexible Semantic Browser," http://swui.semanticweb.org/swui06/papers/Wilson/Wilson.pdf

It is important to learn 'bottom up' from examples that people create to solve real and perceived needs. I recently posted the slides for my annual 'guided tour' which has dozens of examples to explore for ideas and patterns: http://www.ipgems.com/present/swui_pres_2008.html In that presentation, I summarized one of the most significant outcomes from the CHI2008 workshop and poster, the "Vision of rich context: formal, social, personal, situational" (kudos to mc schraefel's position paper delivery that sparked this... thanks mc!). http://www.ipgems.com/present/swui_pres_2008.html#(11) (the 'state of the future art' perhaps?).

The question we have asked for a few years is: "what problems might the sw solve that existing technologies and methods struggle to solve - what's unique?" The background paper supporting the CHI workshop (2008 in Florence) was based on extensive discussions during and after the 2007 workshop on just that question. (Lloyd - help - is this link broken? http://swui.webscience.org/challenges) also available in the ACM Digital Library: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1358628.1358959&coll=Portal&dl=ACM&CFI D=14117627&CFTOKEN=31407316. I suspect that this can provide the basis of a short write-up on key issues. I would also suggest the paper review criteria from the CHI workshop, which were crafted to guide people in the things we felt were important contributions: http://swui.webscience.org/SWUI2008CHI/#What

One other useful reference is a mindmap that grew out of a conversation of the things we have to consider in the user interaction 'landscape' - and where we were beginning to see research initiatives even in 2004 and 2005 workshops. http://www.ipgems.com/swui/swui_mindmap.html