Alisdair Owens

The evolving mSpace platform: leveraging the semantic web on the trail of the memex

Vannevar Bush proposed the memex as a means to support building knowledge in the way he says the human brain works: by association. Achieving this vision has been a core motivation for hypertext research. In this paper, we suggest first that Bushs memex reflects an interaction paradigm rather than system design. Second, we propose that Semantic Web promises to provide the mechanisms to enable these interaction requirements. Third, we propose the mSpace framework and architecture as a platform to deploy lightweight Semantic Web applications which foreground associative interaction. We propose this lightweight approach as a means to evaluate both interaction needs and the cost/benefits of using Semantic Web technologies to support them.

Journey planning based on user needs

In this paper we discuss potential developments to the design of pre-trip in-home journey planning services, to include support for additional user needs. These needs were identified through stakeholder interviews as contributing to actual decisions in route selection scenarios and include: safety, weather and even fitness. A journey planner was designed to allow users to articulate these constraints and a series of paper prototypes were evaluated through cognitive walkthroughs. An exploratory study compared three designs and provided rationale for the most effective interaction method, informing an implementation plan.

Challenges in supporting faceted semantic browsing of multimedia collections

This paper describes our experience developing a semantically-rich exploratory interface that integrates a suite of Newsfilm media sources and associated information. Indeed, the affordances for real time, direct manipulation queries provided by the UI have driven the engineering challenges to support such queries across the network. In this paper we review our efforts first to use strictly semantic web technologies, then hybrid database with semantic web wrapper technologies, and now, ultimately, standard database technologies for real time dynamic queries. We consider how the lessons learned about performance design to support such rich queries will need to be addressed in semantic web technologies in order to better support thsemantic exploratory experience across distributed data resources.