Galia Angelova Institute for Parallel Processing, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Visualisation and Semantic Structuring of Content (some thoughts and suggestions)

Introduction Many tools support visualisation of semantic content - since end users need: –guidance to navigate through complex hyperspaces and –friendly interfaces to maintain multimedia information more effectively With the “Semantic Web” age, a new paradigm appeared: –New requirements concerning the Organisation / Meta-annotation / Maintenance –New requirements concerning the user interface With strong influence in cultural content

Approaches to the interface design There are at least two paradigms, based on text elements / keywords One of them (the menu-based one) is dominating since it is driven by the traditions of the developers The other one is emerging and demonstrated by successful applications only

(1) Topic Maps and Visualization Topic Maps are an ISO/IEC standard (ISO/IEC 13250:2003) for the representation and interchange of knowledge, with an emphasis on information finding. Increasingly popular (e.g. educational topic maps) Visual Thesaurus is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words

Britannica BrainStormer The latest version of Encyclopedia Britannica uses TheBrain technology to power a search and discovery engine called Britannica BrainStormer™. By using links to BrainStormer within the encyclopedia articles, users can rapidly expand their coverage of a given topic.

Ontopia Vizigator The Ontopia Vizigator ("vi[z]ual navigator") provides a graphical interface which is well-suited to complement a text-based interface.

Topic Maps today Topic Maps might be a good approach for ensuring the user interface interoperability However: Some standardisation efforts are needed to ensure compatibility of annotations supporting the Topic Maps. There are no such initiatives at present as every application interface is developed independently, oriented to a different kind of users.

(2) Menu-based interfaces: e.g. MuseumFinland -- Finnish Museums on the Semantic Web They investigate how to make cultural collections available and semantically interoperable through internet Semantic web technologies provide means for integrating different databases and a basis for creating intelligent information retrieval systems for such a global data repository All is integrated behind a single user interface and operates using the meta-data

Multi-faceted search paradigm A walkthrough the taxonomic hierarchieshttp:// Browsing manually category by category At the bottom position, there are photos / digital images (museum artefacts to be shown) and text descriptions associated to them Designed by computer scientists (full of menus), in contrast to the Topic Maps

Example – the CIPHER Project /IST a technological solution again

Personal opinion – the users of cultural content might prefer the Topic Maps approach Topic Maps are more intuitive The user makes the first choice alphabetically or types in a key word Then only the related elements appear on the screen The content can be browsed step by step, moving to the next interesting point (instead of alphabetic listing the hierarchies)

Multilinguality, btw Both approaches are easy to translate to multilingual paradigms, as they are based on key words and terms The lists of taxonomies – alphabetically – are language sensitive Topic Maps can be translated to another language with 100% preservation of the graphical interface

Standardisation ?? FORGET IT No systematic efforts for standardisation of underlying formats People simply join a community and follow the recommendations there Visualisation is task-specific, i.e. the interfaces are oriented to the specific users and specific tasks There are (practically) no user studies regarding customer satisfaction

Problems, Problems … There are no initiatives to standardise the display form and every tool implements it in a different graphical layout. Perhaps this is how it should be In Semantic Web, many diverse approaches co-exist without attempts to exchange data or software. For instance, topic maps and RDF are proposed by two standardisation organisations, ISO and W3C respectively, which might be regarded as competitors. This could mean that: –The field is in its infantry and far from the market and real applications

Conclusion – summary of the present situation On the one hand: the graphical representation of semantic information is a strong tendency It is already adopted for interfaces oriented to end users (and often demonstrated for cultural content) On the other hand: the majority of the visualisation tools are isolated standardisation and interoperability considerations are still at a very initial phase, just included in the development schedule of the modern semantic-based systems.

Thanks for your attention and …