Ali Khalili

The RDFa Content Editor - From WYSIWYG to WYSIWYM

Recently practical approaches for managing and supporting the life-cycle of semantic content on the Web of Data made quite some progress. However, the currently least developed aspect of the semantic content life-cycle is the user-friendly manual and semi-automatic creation of rich semantic content. In this paper we present the RDFaCE approach for combining WYSIWYG text authoring with the creation of rich semantic annotations. Our approach is based on providing four different views to the content authors: a classical WYSIWYG view, a WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) view making the semantic annotations visible, a fact view and the respective HTML/RDFa source code view. The views are synchronized such that changes made in one of the views automatically update the others. They provide different means of semantic content authoring for the different personas involved in the content creation life-cycle. For bootstrapping the semantic annotation process we integrate five different text annotation services. We evaluate their accuracy and empirically show that a combination of them yields superior results.

Review article: User interfaces for semantic authoring of textual content: A systematic literature review

Practical approaches for managing and supporting the life-cycle of semantic content on the Web of Data have recently made quite some progress. In particular in the area of the user-friendly manual and semi-automatic creation of rich semantic content we have observed recently a large number of approaches and systems being described in the literature. With this survey we aim to provide an overview on the rapidly emerging field of Semantic Content Authoring (SCA). We conducted a systematic literature review comprising a thorough analysis of 31 primary studies out of 175 initially retrieved papers addressing the semantic authoring of textual content. We obtained a comprehensive set of quality attributes for SCA systems together with corresponding user interface features suggested for their realization. The quality attributes include aspects such as usability, automation, generalizability, collaboration, customizability and evolvability. The primary studies were surveyed in the light of these quality attributes and we performed a thorough analysis of four SCA systems. The proposed quality attributes and UI features facilitate the evaluation of existing approaches and the development of novel more effective and intuitive semantic authoring interfaces.

Adaptive Linked Data-Driven Web Components: Building Flexible and Reusable Semantic Web Interfaces

Due to the increasing amount of Linked Data openly published on the Web, user-facing Linked Data Applications LDAs are gaining momentum. One of the major entrance barriers for Web developers to contribute to this wave of LDAs is the required knowledge of Semantic Web SW technologies such as the RDF data model and SPARQL query language. This paper presents an adaptive component-based approach together with its open source implementation for creating flexible and reusable SW interfaces driven by Linked Data. Linked Data-driven LD-R Web components abstract the complexity of the underlying SW technologies in order to allow reuse of existing Web components in LDAs, enabling Web developers who are not experts in SW to develop interfaces that view, edit and browse Linked Data. In addition to the modularity provided by the LD-R components, the proposed RDF-based configuration method allows application assemblers to reshape their user interface for different use cases, by either reusing existing shared configurations or by creating their proprietary configurations.

conTEXT – Lightweight Text Analytics Using Linked Data

The Web democratized publishing – everybody can easily publish information on a Website, Blog, in social networks or microblogging systems. The more the amount of published information grows, the more important are technologies for accessing, analysing, summarising and visualising information. While substantial progress has been made in the last years in each of these areas individually, we argue, that only the intelligent combination of approaches will make this progress truly useful and leverage further synergies between techniques. In this paper we develop a text analytics architecture of participation, which allows ordinary people to use sophisticated NLP techniques for analysing and visualizing their content, be it a Blog, Twitter feed, Website or article collection. The architecture comprises interfaces for information access, natural language processing and visualization. Different exchangeable components can be plugged into this architecture, making it easy to tailor for individual needs. We evaluate the usefulness of our approach by comparing both the effectiveness and efficiency of end users within a task-solving setting. Moreover, we evaluate the usability of our approach using a questionnaire-driven approach. Both evaluations suggest that ordinary Web users are empowered to analyse their data and perform tasks, which were previously out of reach.

WYSIWYM Authoring of Structured Content Based on Schema.org

Structured data is picking up on the Web, particularly in the search world. Schema.org, jointly initiated by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! provides a hierarchical set of vocabularies to embed metadata in HTML pages for an enhanced search and browsing experience. RDFa-Lite, Microdata and JSON-LD as lower semantic techniques have gained more attention by Web users to markup Web pages and even emails based on Schema.org. However, from the user interface point of view, we still lack user-friendly tools that facilitate the process of structured content authoring. The majority of information still is contained in and exchanged using unstructured documents, such as Web pages, text documents, images and videos. This can also not be expected to change, since text, images and videos are the natural way how humans interact with information. In this paper we present RDFaCE as an implementation of WYSIWYM (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Mean) concept for direct manipulation of semantically structured content in conventional modalities. RDFaCE utilizes on-the-fly form generation based on Schema.org vocabulary for embedding metadata within Web documents. Furthermore, it employs external NLP services to enable automatic annotation of entities and to suggest URIs for entities. RDFaCE is written as a plugin for TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor thereby can be easily integrated into existing content management systems.

SlideWiki: elicitation and sharing of corporate knowledge using presentations

Presentations play a crucial role in knowledge management within organizations, in particular to facilitate organizational learning and innovation. Much of the corporate strategy, direction and accumulated knowledge within organizations is encapsulated in presentations. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of current presentation tools for semi-structured knowledge representation and sharing within organizations. We address challenges such as collaborative creation of presentations, tracking changes within them, sharing and reusing existing presentations. Then we present SlideWiki as a crowd-sourcing platform for the elicitation and sharing of corporate knowledge using presentations. With SlideWiki users can author, collaborate and arrange slides in organizational presentations by employing Web 2.0 strategies. Presentations can be organized hierarchically, so as to structure them reasonably according to their content. According to the wiki paradigm, all content in SlideWiki (i.e. slides, decks, themes, diagrams) are versioned and users can fork and merge presentations the same way as modern social coding platforms allow. Moreover, SlideWiki supports social networking activities such as following and discussing presentations for effective knowledge management. The article also comprises an evaluation of our SlideWiki implementation involving real users.

Ubiquitous Semantic Applications: A Systematic Literature Review

Recently practical approaches for development of ubiquitous semantic applications have made quite some progress. In particular in the area of the ubiquitous access to the semantic data the authors recently observed a large number of approaches, systems and applications being described in the literature. With this survey the authors aim to provide an overview on the rapidly emerging field of Ubiquitous Semantic Applications (UbiSA). The authors conducted a systematic literature review comprising a thorough analysis of 48 primary studies out of 172 initially retrieved papers. The authors obtained a comprehensive set of quality attributes for UbiSA together with corresponding application features suggested for their realization. The quality attributes include aspects such as mobility, usability, heterogeneity, collaboration, customizability and evolvability. The primary studies were surveyed in the light of these quality attributes and the authors performed a thorough analysis of five ubiquitous semantic applications, six frameworks for UbiSA, three UbiSA specific ontologies, five ubiquitous semantic systems and nine general approaches. The proposed quality attributes facilitate the evaluation of existing approaches and the development of novel, more effective and intuitive UbiSA.

WYSIWYM - Integrated visualization, exploration and authoring of semantically enriched un-structured content

The Semantic Web and Linked Data gained traction in the last years. However, the majority of information still is contained in unstructured documents. This can also not be expected to change, since text, images and videos are the natural way how humans interact with information. Semantic structuring on the other hand enables the (semi-)automatic integration, repurposing, rearrangement of information. NLP technologies and formalisms for the integrated representation of unstructured and semantic content (such as RDFa and Microdata) aim at bridging this semantic gap. However, in order for humans to truly benefit from this integration, we need ways to author, visualize and explore unstructured and semantically enriched content in an integrated manner. In this paper, we present the WYSIWYM (What You See is What You Mean) concept, which addresses this issue and formalizes the binding between semantic representation models and UI elements for authoring, visualizing and exploration. With RDFaCE, Pharmer and conTEXT we present and evaluate three complementary showcases implementing the WYSIWYM concept for different application domains.

Using an Enterprise Mashup Infrastructure for Just-in-Time Management of Situational Projects

The recent advent of web mashups that enable ad hoc integration of information and services from multiple disparate resources brings into the spotlight a new approach for managing situational projects in organizations. Situational projects are unpredictable and transient projects within an organization that come with limited number of users with specific needs. Handling these projects differs from traditional project management approaches. They need rapid and good enough solutions. In this paper a simple and organized approach for managing situational projects is proposed. The proposed approach tries to handle situational projects by creating a mashup infrastructure in the organization. There are three types of participants in our approach: Mashup manager, mashup resource analyst and mashup resource builder. Cooperation between these participants results in managing a situational project. Furthermore a meaningful real world scenario is defined to describe different steps of the approach. In addition, advantages of the proposed approach are identified and challenges of using web mashups along with guidelines to cope with them are expressed.

A Framework for Distributed Market Place Based on Intelligent Software Agents and Semantic Web Services

In this paper we present a framework for automation of distributed market place that is based on intelligent software agents and semantic Web services. A multi-agent environment designed for automation of e-commerce activities such as negotiation between buyer and seller, recommendation, and customer decision making. Furthermore we use a semantic Web service middleware called StraBM , advising managers of e-shops for making appropriate strategic decisions and managing business models. StraBM uses a customized WSMX middleware to generate appropriate strategy and business models.