m.c. schraefel

Linked Open Government Data: Lessons from Data.gov.uk

A project to extract value from open government data contributes to the population of the linked data Web with high-value data of good provenance.

mSpace: improving information access to multimedia domains with multimodal exploratory search

Overview of mSpace interaction approach for presenting exploratory search particularly in the audio domain by using slices, preview cues, and user-determined organization of information from high-dimensional spaces

Hunter gatherer: interaction support for the creation and management of within-web-page collections

Hunter Gatherer is an interface that lets Web users carry out three main tasks: (1) collect components from within Web pages; (2) represent those components in a collection; (3) edit those component collections. Our research shows that while the practice of making collections of content from within Web pages is common, it is not frequent, due in large part to poor interaction support in existing tools. We engaged with users in task analysis as well as iterative design reviews in order to understand the interaction issues that are part of within-Web-page collection making and to design an interaction that would support that process.We report here on that design development, as well as on the evaluations of the tool that evolved from that process, and the future work stemming from these results, in which our critical question is: what happens to users perceptions and expectations of web-based information (their web-based information management practices) when they can treat this information as harvestable, recontextualizable data, rather than as fixed pages?

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.

Trust me, i'm partially right: incremental visualization lets analysts explore large datasets faster

Queries over large scale (petabyte) data bases often mean waiting overnight for a result to come back. Scale costs time. Such time also means that potential avenues of exploration are ignored because the costs are perceived to be too high to run or even propose them. With sampleAction we have explored whether interaction techniques to present query results running over only incremental samples can be presented as sufficiently trustworthy for analysts both to make closer to real time decisions about their queries and to be more exploratory in their questions of the data. Our work with three teams of analysts suggests that we can indeed accelerate and open up the query process with such incremental visualizations.

From Keyword Search to Exploration: Designing Future Search Interfaces for the Web

This monograph is directed at researchers and developers who are designing the next generation of web search user interfaces, by focusing on the techniques and visualizations that allow users to interact with and have control over their findings. Search is one of the keys to the Webs success. The elegant way in which search results are returned has been well researched and is usually remarkably effective. However, the body of work produced by decades of research into information retrieval continues to grow rapidly and so it has become hard to synthesize the current state-of-the-art to produce a search interface that is both highly functional, but not cluttered and distracting. Further, recent work has shown that there is substantial room for improving the support provided to users who are exhibiting more exploratory forms of search, including when users may need to learn, discover, and understand novel or complex topics. Overall, there is a recognized need for search systems to provide effective user experiences that do more than simply return results. With the aim of producing more effective search interfaces, human computer interaction researchers and web designers have been developing novel interactions and features that enable users to conveniently visualize, parse, manipulate, and organize their Web search results. For instance, while a simple set of results may produce specific information (e.g., the capital of Peru), other methods may let users see and explore the contexts of their requests for information (more about the country, city, and nearby attractions), or the properties that associate groups of information assets (grouping hotels, restaurants, and attractions by their type, district, or price). Other techniques support information-seeking processes that may last weeks or months or may even require collaboration between multiple searchers. The choice of relevant result visualization strategies in new search systems should reflect the searchers and the higher-level information needs that motivate their searches. These examples provide further motivation for supporting designers, who are challenged to synthesize and understand the breadth of advances in search, so that they can determine the benefits of varied strategies and apply them appropriately to build better systems. To support researchers and designers in synthesizing and understanding the advances in search, this monograph offers a structured means to think about web search result visualization, based on an inclusive model of search that integrates information retrieval, information seeking and a higher-level context of tasks and goals. We examine each of these levels of search in a survey of advances in browsers and related tools by defining search-related cognitive processes and analyzing innovative design approaches. We then discuss evaluations at each of these levels of search, presenting significant results and identifying both the traditional and novel means used to produce them. Based on this examination, we propose a taxonomy of search result visualization techniques that can be used to identify gaps for future research and as a reference for designers of next generation web search systems.

The radial scroll tool: scrolling support for stylus- or touch-based document navigation

We present radial scroll, an interface widget to support scrolling particularly on either small or large scale touch displays. Instead of dragging a elevator in a scroll bar, or using repetitive key presses to page up or down, users gesture anywhere on the document surface such that clockwise gestures advance the document; counter clockwise gestures reverse the document. We describe our prototype implementation and discuss the results of an initial user study.

Breaking the book: translating the chemistry lab book into a pervasive computing lab environment

The UK e-Science programme is relying on the evolution of the paper lab book into a pervasive data gathering lab system. To date take up of existing commercial or research lab book replacement systems has not been great. In this paper, we reconsider both the role of the lab book in the experimental cycle, as well as its affective and experiential properties as an artefact, in order to design an e-Science lab book that will be acceptable to the scientists who will use it. To this end we combined and extended existing design analysis models in order to assess the artefact functionally and experientially. We present the approach we developed, the prototype we designed based on our analysis, and the results of the formative study we performed of the artefact in real use. We show that our design elicitation method strongly contributed to the success of our prototypes take up.

CS AKTive space: representing computer science in the semantic web

We present a Semantic Web application that we callCS AKTive Space. The application exploits a wide range of semantically heterogeneousand distributed content relating to Computer Science research in theUK. This content is gathered on a continuous basis using a variety of methods including harvesting and scraping as well as adopting a range models for content acquisition. The content currently comprises aroundten million RDF triples and we have developed storage, retrieval andmaintenance methods to support its management. The content is mediated through an ontology constructed for the application domainand incorporates components from other published ontologies. CS AKTive Spacesupports the exploration of patterns and implications inherent in the content and exploits a variety of visualisations and multi dimensional representations. Knowledge services supported in the applicationinclude investigating communities of practice: who is working, researching or publishing with whom. This work illustrates a number ofsubstantial challenges for the Semantic Web. These include problems of referential integrity, tractable inference and interaction support. Wereview our approaches to these issues and discuss relevant related work.

Connecting the dots: a multi-pivot approach to data exploration

The purpose of data browsers is to help users identify and query data effectively without being overwhelmed by large complex graphs of data. A proposed solution to identify and query data in graph-based datasets is Pivoting (or set-oriented browsing), a many-to-many graph browsing technique that allows users to navigate the graph by starting from a set of instances followed by navigation through common links. Relying solely on navigation, however, makes it difficult for users to find paths or even see if the element of interest is in the graph when the points of interest may be many vertices apart. Further challenges include finding paths which require combinations of forward and backward links in order to make the necessary connections which further adds to the complexity of pivoting. In order to mitigate the effects of these problems and enhance the strengths of pivoting we present a multi-pivot approach which we embodied in tool called Visor. Visor allows users to explore from multiple points in the graph, helping users connect key points of interest in the graph on the conceptual level, visually occluding the remainder parts of the graph, thus helping create a road-map for navigation. We carried out an user study to demonstrate the viability of our approach.