Miguel Ceriani

Keeping “InTOUCH”: An Ongoing Co-design Project to Share Memories, Skills and Demands through an Interactive Table

We describe the first phases of an ongoing co-design project for a cooperative distributed space, based on multi-touch technologies, through which older adults engaged in the activities of recreational centres in their everyday contexts could keep in touch with others, for example other recreational centres, and with a general public. The project’s main goal is to foster the active participation of older people as producers of resources related to their experience and know-how and to the activities carried out in the centres, to be shared in a community context. The project aims to fulfill some seniors’ needs and wishes as “always learning new things”, “being with others” and “not staying at home”.

Linked Data Queries as Jigsaw Puzzles: a Visual Interface for SPARQL Based on Blockly Library

SPARQL is a powerful query language for Semantic Web data sources but it is quite complex to master. The jigsaw puzzle methaphor has been succesfully used in Blockly to teach programming to kids. We discuss its applicability to the problem of building SPARQL queries, through the presentation of a dedicated Blockly-based visual user interface.

Using blocks to get more blocks: Exploring linked data through integration of queries and result sets in block programming

While many Linked Data sources are available, there is a lack of effective non-expert user interfaces to build structured queries on them. The block programming paradigm promotes a gradual and modular approach. If - in an integrated user interface - both queries and results are represented as blocks, modularity can be effectively used to support an exploratory way of designing Linked Data queries.

SWOWS and dynamic queries to build browsing applications on linked data

The linked data initiative is pushing dataset maintainers to publish data online in a highly reusable way through a set of open standards, such as RDF and SPARQL. The variety and amount of structured data available on the Web are increasing, but their consumption is still quite limited. In particular, applications that are used to explore linked data are usually generic linked data browsers or applications with hard-coded logic tailored for specific needs. SWOWS is a platform for declarative specification of applications consuming linked data. In this paper, we describe the use of the platform for creating browsing applications tailored to specific contexts, and show how the declarative paradigm supports the development of flexible applications. To this end, the platform has been extended to support the dynamic generation of SPARQL queries. An example of a linked data browser created with the platform is given. HighlightsA platform for definining interactive applications based on linked data is proposed.A case study is presented in the field of semantic information retrieval.An interface for the composition of pipelines defining an application is presented.

A Dataflow Platform for In-silico Experiments Based on Linked Data

A big part of the work carried out by scientists nowadays involves data manipulation: access and integration of different local and online datasets, filtering for relevant information, aggregating and visualising the data to look for or defend hypotheses. The Linked Data Initiative is pushing dataset maintainers to publish data in a highly reusable way through a set of open standards, such as RDF and SPARQL. The adoption of these technologies in the scientific community is still marginal, partly for the limits of the available tools for consuming and manipulating data. We present a concrete pipeline language and a working prototype (including a visual editor and a pipeline engine) by which users can build and share applications consuming and visualising linked data.

SparqlBlocks: Using Blocks to Design Structured Linked Data Queries

While many Linked Data sources are available, the task of building structured queries on them is still a challenging one for users who are not conversant in the specialised query languages required for their effective use. A key hindering factor is the lack of intuitive user interfaces for these languages. The block programming paradigm is becoming popular for the development of visual interfaces that are easy to use and guaranteed to generate syntactically correct programs, promoting a gradual and modular approach to the task of programming. We exploit these features of the block paradigm to develop SparqlBlocks, a visual language and an integrated user interface in which both Linked Data queries and results are represented as blocks, supporting a modular and exploratory approach to query design. By integrating the presentation of queries and results, reuse of results in the refinement of queries is promoted, as well as the exploration of both the data and the structure of Linked Data sources. SparqlBlocks has been evaluated with 11 users literate in computer science but with small to no expertise in querying Linked Data. After a tutorial, all the users were able to build at least a simple query and all but two were able to build nontrivial queries.

Towards an Ontology-Based Generic Pipeline Editor

The pipeline concept is widely used in computer science to represent non-sequential computations, from scientific workflows to streaming transformation languages. While pipelines stand out as a highly visual representation of computation, several pipeline languages lack visual editors of production quality. We propose a method by which a generic pipeline editor can be built, centralizing the features needed to maintain and edit different pipeline languages. To foster adoption, especially in less programming-savvy communities, the proposed visual editor will be web-based. An ontology-based approach is adopted for the description of both the general features of the pipelines and the specific languages to be supported. Concepts, properties and constraints are defined using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), providing grounding in existing standards and extensibility. The work also leverages existing ontologies defined for scientific worlkflows.

Collaborative multimedia content creation and sharing by older adults

We describe an ongoing co-design project for a collaborative distributed space, based on multi-touch technologies, through which older adults can explore self-produced and on-line multimedia resources for the production of short video clips. The projects main goal is to foster the active participation of older people, already experiencing collaboration in daily activities in care centres, as producers of content related to their experience and know-how and to the activities carried out in the centres, to be shared in a community context. An interface, based on an interactive table, some tablets and a television set, is sketched.