Justification of the Tutorial
The past 3 years have seen an exponential increase in interest in
user interaction aspects of the semantic web. This interest is
reflected, for example, in the series of workshops on user interaction
that have been held at the last few international semantic web
conferences (e.g., SWUI 2006, the 3rd International Semantic Web User
Interaction Workshop, held at ISWC 2006) and the Semantic Web User
Interaction (SWUI) mailing list (see
http://swui.semanticweb.org/). With some exceptions, however, the work
in this area has been limited in two ways:
- Identification of general usability challenges. The focus
so far in work on interaction design for the semantic web has been on
usability opportunities: ways in which user interfaces can
exploit the power of semantic web technologies to provide a better
user experience. With a few exceptions (e.g., the first
presenter’s keynote at ESWC 2006, available from http://dfki.de/~jameson/abs/Jameson06ESWC.html)
there has not been much effort to formulate general usability
challenges: general interaction design problems that need to be
solved if systems based on semantic technologies are to be highly
usable. A benefit of doing so is that design solutions worked out for
one particular system can better be generalized to other systems for
which the same challenge arises.
-
- Involvement of users in the design process. In the field
of human-computer interaction, there exists a broad repertoire of
methods for involving potential users in all phases of the process of
designing interactive systems. These methods have relatively seldom
been applied where semantic technologies are involved. In this area,
user interaction design tends to be seen as a matter of a designing
(presumably usable) interfaces on the basis of assumptions made by the
system’s designer.
The proposed tutorial aims to help interested participants to
overcome these two limitations. We also hope that participants will
pass on to colleagues and students some of what they have learned.
