Juan Manuel Gimeno

Building a Usable and Accessible Semantic Web Interaction Platform

Semantic Web applications take off is being slower than expected, at least with respect to “real-world” applications and users. One of the main reasons for this lack of adoption is that most Semantic Web user interfaces are still immature from the usability and accessibility points of view. This is due to the novelty of these technologies, but this also motivates the exploration of alternative interaction paradigms, different from the “traditional” Web or Desktop applications ones. Our proposal is realized in the Rhizomer platform, which explores the possibilities of the object–action interaction paradigm at the Web scale. This paradigm is well suited for heterogeneous resource spaces such as those common in the Semantic Web. Resources, described by metadata, correspond to the objects in the paradigm. Semantic web services, which are dynamically associated to these objects, correspond to the actions. The platform is being put into practice in the context of a research project in order to build an open application for media distribution based on Semantic Web technologies. Moreover, its usability and accessibility have been evaluated in this real setting and compared to similar systems.

The Rhizomer Semantic Content Management System

The Rhizomer platform is a Content Management System (CMS) based on a Resource Oriented Approach (RESTful) and Semantic Web technologies. It achieves a great level of flexibility and provides sophisticated content management services. All content is described using semantic metadata semi-automatically extracted from multimedia content, which enriches the browsing experience and enables semantic queries. A usable user interface is built on top of the CMS in order to facilitate the interaction with content and enhance it with the information provided by the associated semantic metadata. As an application scenario of the platform, its use in a media company where audio content is managed and its speech transcript semantically annotated is described.

Publishing and interacting with linked data

In order to make a Semantic Web dataset more usable to a wider range of users, specially Linked Data ones, Rhizomer constitutes a tool for data publishing in the web that in addition to common data browsing mechanisms based on HTML rendering, provides a set of components that facilitate awareness of the dataset at hand borrowed from Information Architecture. Rhizomer automatically generates navigation menus taking into account the ontologies used by the dataset and facets based on how properties are instantiated for each of the classes in the dataset. This makes it possible for users to easily be aware of the main kinds of things in the dataset but also their main properties and the values the take while they perform faceted navigation. These generic IA components are complemented with specialised interaction services that can be dynamically deployed and associated to resource using semantic web services. Among these services, Rhizomer features one that provides simple edition of the data using autocomplete forms guided by the ontologies used in the dataset and the available resources.

SWET-QUM: a quality in use extension model for semantic web exploration tools

In order to make Semantic Web tools more appealing to lay-users, a key factor is their Quality in Use, the quality of the user experience when interacting with them. To assess and motivate the improvement of the quality in use, it is necessary to have a quality model that guides its evaluation and facilitates comparability. The proposal is an extension of the international standard ISO/IEC 25010:2011 that focuses on Semantic Web exploration tools, those that make it possible for lay-users to browse and visualise it. The model is being applied as part of the iterative development process of such a tool and helps guiding its development so the Quality in Use is maximized.

IMPROVED LINKED DATA INTERACTION THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Thanks to Open Data initiatives the amount of data available on the Web is rapidly increasing. Unfortunately, most of these initiatives only publish raw tabular data, which makes its analysis and reuse very difficult. Linked Data principles allow for a more sophisticated approach by making explicit both the structure and semantics of the data. However, from the user experience viewpoint, published datasets continue to be monolithic files which are completely opaque or difficult to explore by making complex semantic queries. Our objective is to facilitate the user to grasp what kind of entities are in the dataset, how they are interrelated, which are their main properties and values, etc. Rhizomer is a data publishing tool whose interface provides a set of components borrowed from Information Architecture (IA) that facilitate getting an insight of the dataset at hand. Rhizomer automatically generates navigation menus and facets based on the kinds of things in the dataset and how they are described through metadata properties and values. This tool is currently being evaluated with end users that discover a whole new perspective of the Web of Data.

25 years teaching HCI in UdL

This work shows the evolution of teaching HCI in the university studies of computer engineering at the University of Lleida. The progress is described in terms of the content and the teaching methodologies based on the experience acquired during the last 25 years. The article details the changes made in the different degrees, from the methodology to the content perspective. The intent is to provide a reference document that can be useful for the teaching community interested in the Human-Computer Interaction discipline.

BESDUI: A Benchmark for End-User Structured Data User Interfaces

The Semantic Web Community has invested significant research efforts in developing systems for Semantic Web search and exploration. But while it has been easy to assess the systems’ computational efficiency, it has been much harder to assess how well different semantic systems’ user interfaces help their users. In this article, we propose and demonstrate the use of a benchmark for evaluating such user interfaces, similar to the TREC benchmark for evaluating traditional search engines. Our benchmark includes a set of typical user tasks and a well-defined procedure for assigning a measure of performance on those tasks to a semantic system. We demonstrate its application to two such system, Virtuoso and Rhizomer. We intend for this work to initiate a community conversation that will lead to a generally accepted framework for comparing systems and for measuring, and thus encouraging, progress towards better semantic search and exploration tools.