Feikje Hielkema

e-Social Science and Evidence-Based Policy Assessment

The PolicyGrid project is exploring the role of Grid, Semantic Web, and Web 2.0 technologies to support e-Social Science, with particular emphasis on tools to facilitate evidence-based policy making. In this article, we discuss the challenges associated with construction of a provenance framework to support evidence-based policy assessment. We then discuss ourSpaces, a virtual research environment for e-Social Science that uses the Web 2.0 paradigm as well as Semantic Grid technologies and which provides researchers with facilities for management of digital resources using a novel natural language interface.

Evaluating an ontology-driven WYSIWYM interface

This paper describes an evaluation study of an ontology-driven WYSIWYM interface for metadata creation. Although the results are encouraging, they are not as positive as those of a similar tool developed for the medical domain. We believe this may be due, not to the WYSIWYM interface, but to the complexity of the underlying ontologies and the fact that subjects were unfamiliar with them. We discuss the ways in which ontology development might be influenced by issues stemming from using an NLG approach for user access to data, and the effect these factors have on general usability.

Using WYSIWYM to Create an Open-ended Interface for the Semantic Grid

Central to the vision of the Semantic Grid is the adoption of metadata and ontologies to describe resources, to promote and enhance collaboration (De Roure et al., 2005). This raises the question of how such metadata comes into existence. Ideally the users should create it themselves, which raises the issue of how a scientist should create RDF. In our work in the area of e-social science, we aim to support social scientists in their research, using (Semantic) Grid technologies. For this, a tool is needed that facilitates easy creation of RDF by non-experts, to enable researchers to deposit and describe their own data. We believe that, for social scientists, natural language is the best medium to use, as the way they conduct their research and the structure of their documents and data indicate that they are more oriented towards text than graphics.