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!

While I am working on many projects dealing with information visualization, I would like to share a good online ressource about this research topic: IBM’s online visualization research site “MANYEYES“.

Finding the right way to view your data is as much an art as a science. The visualizations provided on Many Eyes range from the ordinary to the experimental. We’re deliberately providing a wide array of possibilities since this is an experimental site—and expect to see more soon!

Their featured visualization types include: Network Diagrams, Word Clouds (also links to Wordle), Word Trees, Treemaps, but also the more standard ones as Bubble Charts, Piecharts and histograms, World Maps etc.

Reading through the information given to a specific visualization type (and component) you also find information about for which dataset is it best chosen. => Datasets, such as: unstructured text, proportions, hierarchical structures, continuous change, relationships etc.

Have fun trying some of them out!

Related Links:

• A quite small but also interesting research site dealing with this topic and using some the ManyEyes offerings to name is the The NYTimes’ Visualization Lab.
• Berkeley, University of California – Course Site: 294-10 Visualization
• http://vis.berkeley.edu/~maneesh/
• Martin Wattenberg’s site about Data visualization, Media art and Collective intelligence.

I currently posted a new short article about my latest AJAX experiences: If you are interested in finding a suitable AJAX- or respectively JavaScript-Library for your webproject, just let me give you a short list of current state – more and less compact – JS libraries: …

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