Usabilitea: Improving Access where Interaction Design and the Semantic Web Meet

September 30, 2005
Monica McSchraefel | University of Southampton

Many of us interested in supporting effective access to online information are looking at the Semantic Web as a promising technology to improve web-based information sharing and discovery.

New models of both capturing information and enabling interaction with that information are made possible with this technology. In this talk, i look at two examples of where Interaction Design and the Semantic Web meet: at the front end is mSpace, an interaction model and software framework to support the exploration of rich relationships in information; and at the place the before the front end is Making Tea, a design elicitation method we developed to help transform centuries-old paper-based practices to digital counterparts.

The mSpace interaction model is described through its embodiment in the Semantic Web application, CS AKTive Space. The model provides an interface for heterogeneous Semantic Web sources. mSpaces let users explore information from a point of interest, and then reorient the space to support that focus. The rapid response and visual presentation of context lets users explore richly connected information. This enables rapid task completion, incidental learning, and effective reformulation of goals.

Making Tea, a design method and set of projects, comes out of the eScience community of the UK where the Semantic Web and Semantic Grid are enabling scientists to think about new models for sharing experimental data and results beyond the traditional publication of papers. The goal of this new model, called “publish@source,” supports immediate sharing of both the data and results. In order to get sharable information, however, the data itself must be available in digital form. This requirement means a sea change in “wet lab” science, and new methods in dry lab or in silico science. This story describes the process of moving synthetic chemists from the paper lab book to an all-digital equivalent, and more recently helping bioinformaticians running silico experiments to maintain their digitial ideas.

While the talk celebrates the potential of the Semantic Web to support new methods of access to and rapid development of Web-based resources, it grounds the discussion by situating the technology against similar previous historical practice, and by considering the social contexts of those practice. From this context, we may make explicit some of the caveats that may need to inform the evolution of the Semantic Web – with eScience as an exemplar – if “improved access” is to mean more and other than more only for those who already have access.

Speaker Details

Monica Mc Schraefel is a Senior Lecturer in the IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK. Prior to this, schraefel was an Assistant Prof in the Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, Canada; a researcher at AT&T Research Labs in the Online Platform Research Group, New Jersey; and a faculty member in CS at the U of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada where, from time to time, you could catch her with Her Very Hungry Band playing her own brand of folk funk. Papers, further project descriptions and occasionally bits of tunes can be found at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~mc.