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!

Maybe you already read about the “Small World Phenomenon“; or maybe you know the “Erdös number“? NO? You have probably stumbled upon the game called “Bacon number” or just heard of the more general term “Social Network“?

Well then you are possibly interrested in a currently published paper about the study results on “Planetary-Scale Views on a Large Instant-Messaging Network” (by MS Research).

The Research Paper is is available as PDF on the MS-homepage.

… Summary of some interesting facts

• It is not really surprising that the MS Messenger data analysis shows, that most users tend to communicate much more with people of the same age.
• More surprising ist the fact, that on average, every IM User lists about 50 other users within his contact/buddy-list.
• Several expirements presented in the paper also demonstrate, that the social graph is “well connected, highly transitive, and robust”.
• Most interesting: IM Users know each other over “6,6 degrees” (this is the average path length for the world’s im social network). These statistics again demonstrate and prove the concept of everyone is an average of six steps away from each other.

I stumbled upon a new web 2.0 platform which maintains being an upcoming “web 3.0″-site, namely TWINE. Some people already tried to find out what this platform’s goal of being or respectively becoming a web 3.0-site really means: There is a not transparent use of some ontology/taxonomy mapping in the backend to further enhance their two-dimensional stored “data about data” seen in the widgets on the platform. But it is quite unclear what Twine’s focus next to becoming a big web2.0 platform is, to really call it a better platform than those we alreday find in WWW today … but I think it is worth having a look at this platform in the next months.

I also stumbled upon a publication about “Web Science” and would like to share this one with some of my blog’s readers or other intersted party: Its title is “A Framework for Web Science” and its is freely avaible as Open Journal PDF on the now publisher homepage.
Abstract:

This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web’s topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.

Further Readings:

• My recommendation to begin with: “Web Science: A Provocative Invitation to Computer Science”(by Ben Shneiderman, Communications of the ACM, June 2007/Vol. 50, No. 6)
• “Web Science Research Initiative” (WSRI) – Homepage
• Article on Thinking Space – Blog about Web 2.0 Summit Conference
• “Web Science & Web Technology”- course homepage on TU Graz
• “Semantic Focus” – a “Thoughts on the Semantic Web” – Blog