Google now offers a Public Data Explorer. This is another progressing Google Labs Project that looks quite usable yet. The datasets include, among others, minimum wage in europe, world development indicators etc.

Such public data visualizations are good examples of what can be achieved by information visualization. Such as, this small and easy created visual comparision of Agricultural land between the World and Austria lets users quickly examine that Austria’s agriculture is decreasing while the world’s one is still rising.

But have a look for yourself and create your own visualizations.

User Experience & Interaction Design are two of the most important issues when facing the current use of our World Wide Web. Though, most scientists and developers forget, that the Semantic Web and therefore also the Internet-Data’s Understanding is strongly connected with UE.

Within my future thoughts and projects I will be approaching the Semantic Web from more of a Interaction-Design or respectively user-focussed perspective. So obviously there are many interesting viewpoints to be taken into account when dealin with this wide-ranging issue.

The first question I stated was what are the different ways to look at this topic; here is a short answer to it:

Notes:

To begin with, I would like to use this post to note down a very incomplete listof professionals, conferences, symposia and institutes (which I may update from time to time), that are besides the obwvious ones, dealing with this topic somehow:

• iSchools iConference
• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) – Sympoisum on Creative Intelligent Systems
• UC Berkeley School of Information
• Semantic Web User Interaction (SWUI)
• InfoVis C. – A data code compute resource
• A Timeline Visualization of Information History
• Information Aesthetics – Where form follows data – Blog
• DataVisualization.ch – Blog
• many many more

Catchphrases, Quotes & other thoughts:

concept of … highly adaptable … up-scaling views …

“Students shall choose projects with high societal payoffs, researchers have to employ the updated science 2.0 strategies, developers have to focus on genuine user needs”

Eventually, one of our best hopes for the future is that a large and connected group of people can change the world!”

Concept: Let us think of what should be achieved by 2020 and do something about it!

Dear readers,

thank you for reading my blog and I hope you did not wonder why I did not write for a longer time! Due to some work schedules and a sports-accident, I did not finish any blogpost about sports- and webscience-research-news. However, today I write again and would like to introduce two kind of funny terms I thought about while I was describing the difference between Wikipedia and Google to my father:

Most of us are “digital aborigins” and not “digital immigrants” as my parents for instance are. Therefore some terms are quite obvious clearer for us than maybe some relatives and/or aquaintances or even friends. There we may sometimes take sth. for granted but forget, that this knowledge is not as explicit as we thought it to be.

Therefore I would just like to remind you again of thinking sometimes in another perspective and thinking how others would perceive a situation. Some things will straighten out.

Some further readings:

• UI Design on Wikipedia
• GUI Bloopers (Book about user interface design “bloopers”: from dvarious information spaces, explaining how intelligent, well-intentioned professionals made these dreadful mistakes…)
• Only for the more into the SW people: Semantic Web User Interaction (SWUI)