Why mockups are essential for semantic applications design

Applications based on semantic technologies offer new ways to discover, browse and explore information – this is for sure. But how can we (as a semantic web “insider”) explain these potential benefits to a typical end-user, who has never heard anything about “faceted search” before (which doesn´t mean that he wouldn´t love intelligent user interfaces if they were in place)?

The answer are mockups (in a sense of prototyping user interfaces). Although even Google has started recently to implement a little bit semantics by offering auto-complete functionality on google.com (on some local versions like google.at this feature is still not available) most basic concepts for an intelligent search interface are still not common sense.

We are that googlized that nearly none of us can think of different ways of searching for information than Google has offered for many years now: Put a couple of words in a text box, click a button and scroll through a list of headers and abstracts. Repeat that until you´re done. Wow!

Of course, many people get irritated instantly by complex user interfaces like David Huynh´s Freebase Parallax. “That´s only for experts!” is their response. But in a corporate setting complex queries belong to our daily business – they are just not supported by common search engines (only exception are data mining solutions). But that doesn´t necessarily mean that we wouldn´t need it.

Where is the way out of this dilemma?

• Explain to the end-users how semantic technologies can enhance search & browse experiences
• Do not use terms like SPARQL or RDF
• Create a simple mockup to explain it
• You´re not a designer? Use tools like Balsamiq – Try it now!

Here is an example for a mockup of a semantically enhanced expert finder:

These kind of mockups are essential for any requirements engineering phase in any project where search is a bit more than a text-box, a button and a bunch of documents.

Freebase Parallax: Browsing ad infinitum

Just recently an inspiring new user interface came out, which gives users an idea, that “googling” the web isn´t the ultimate way to find information on the web: Freebase Parallax by David Huynh. David was also strongly involved in some projects of CSAIL at MIT which also dealt with the “simple” question: How to make (web) data more accessible for users who aren´t aware of SPARQL, SQL or OLAP cubes. For example, Exhibit became a wide-spread environment to setup a faceted search on a given dataset. A bit more sophisticated is the “nested faceted browser” – and now Parallax is out.

In his screencast about this “novel browsing interface” David stresses the advantages over Google or Wikipedia. Is this a fair competition? So what is the novel thing?

1. If you want to learn a bit more about Abraham Lincoln – go to Wikipedia!
2. If you want to know where you can find even more information about Abraham Lincoln – go to Google!
3. If you know a bit about Abraham Lincoln already, and you want to aggregate or compare some facts of his life to other presidents or you want to visualise some data on a time-line or on a map – learn how to handle a tool like Parallax (and don´t complain, that this isn´t as simple as Google anymore)!

In some ascpects Parallax was a missing building block in the web universe: (Professional) fact finding on the web could work like this in the close future (although Parallax needs some more servers and – indeed – some more data in the database).

But what if Parallax became the graph-based UI on top of Freebase + LinkingOpenData?

Natural language search – a new breakthrough?

While I am still waiting for an invitation from Twine  (probably you too?) I have received one from Powerset – natural language search. Powerset obviously is a promising company (and is promising a lot), so I was excited when I was starting to play around with this new tool which still isn´t available for the public.

The very first impression was good. The interface is well done and there are a couple of new ideas how wikipedia (and similar knowledge bases) can be navigated in the future. But unfortunately after a while it was clear, that search results must be improved. However Powerset might be implemented, the only benchmark which counts at the end is, which improvement the new application (semantic web or not) delivers compared to existing ones. Some examples:

- The question: “who is the president of the united states?” delivers some similar questions or related articles of wikipedia but NOT the right answer.

In comparison: ask.com delivers this perfect result.

- My next question “where was mozart born?” delivers “Getreidegasse” which is correct but actually too much detailed. Again, ask.com delivers the perfect answer.

A third try which was an even more difficult question: “how far is london from paris?” was again correctly answered by ask.com, powerlabs wasn´t even close…

When I was asking START, the world’s first Web-based question answering system, which has been on-line and continuously operating since December, 1993 (!) those three questions – all of them – were answered correctly.

So finally I was asking something really tricky: “What is the relationship between RDF and XML?”: Only START gave the right answer which was: “Unfortunately, I don’t have that information.”

“Knowledge Relationship Discovery” with Google

One of the most important class of applications within the semantic web are services which help users to find out “hidden” relationships between resources like people, concepts or documents.

I´ve been trying out Google Sets from time to time which was an always impressive application to me. You enter one or more members (eg. persons, companies, technologies etc.) from the same class of your choice and Google “predicts” what else could fit into this set.

To me it seems like this service has been improved constantly in the last few months. If you type in just one member of an imaginary class like a person´s name you´ll see that Google has not only categorized search phrases but also knows a lot about social relationships.

http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=andreas+blumauer – wow, Google knows a lot about my social network…

Reminder: Call for papers TRIPLE-I

TRIPLE-I
The Innovation Conference for Knowledge Management, New Media Technology and Semantic Technologies

5 – 7 September 2007
Graz, Austria

http://www.triple-i.info

The TRIPLE-I Conference series is a joint venture of the conferences

•   I-KNOW – International Conference on Knowledge Management
•   I-MEDIA – International Conference on New Media Technology
•   I-SEMANTICS – International Conference on Semantic Technology

Regular paper submissions for I-KNOW may include but are not limited to:

- Identifying Relationships between different kinds of Knowledge Entities
- Service-oriented Architectures for Knowledge Management Systems
- Service-based Knowledge Management
- Orchestration of Knowledge Management Services
- Distributed Knowledge Management
- Social Network Analysis
- Knowledge Work Productivity
- Communication and Collaboration in Knowledge Management
- Context and Usage Pattern Identification and Management
- Agile Approaches to Knowledge Management

Regular paper submissions for I-MEDIA may include but are not limited
to:

- Web 2.0 Applications for Content Providers
- Business Models for New Media
- Social Media Platforms
- User-Generated Content
- Cross-Media Content Production and Delivery
- Cross-Media Search and Retrieval
- New Media Services
- Innovative User Interfaces for Media Devices
- The Geospatial Web
- Marketing of Products and Services via New Media

Regular paper submissions for I-SEMANTICS may include but are not limited to:

- Semantic Social Software
- Semantic Wikis and Weblogs
- Semantic Desktop
- Social Tagging and Folksonomies
- Ontology Engineering
- Terminology Management
- Visualisation of Semantic Models
- Interoperability, Integration and Reasoning
- Semantic Web Applications
- Experiences, Studies and Metrices

Deadlines
21 May 2007: Full paper submission (4-8 pages)
18 June 2007:   Notification of acceptance
13 July 2007:  Final version (8 pages)
5-7 September 2007: TRIPLE-I Conference

Yet another search interface for wikipedia?

It has always been worth using exalead from time to time to “exalead” (somehow that verb isn´t that popular as “to google”) one´s favourite search phrases (you usually type in when you start your computer in the morning . That´s because exalead finds sometimes really “new” websites for you when you´re a regular google-user. So, until now exalead was rather interesting as an alternative like alcohol-free beer – give it a chance!

Now there is a reason to go to exalead: Try out exalead´s search over wikipedia and you will have a similiar experience as you have with dbpedia.

You´ll be able to refine your search phrase, therefore exalead offers even typed tagclouds (different colors mean different types of associations, like people or places). A nice Web 2.0-like GUI and high performance convinces finally.

One last question: What if dbpedia and exalead would combine their different approaches (dbpedia tripled wikipedia, exalead still remains in the area of automatic text-extraction) to put even more semantics into wikipedia?

Meaning-based search engine

The recently published Top 100 Alternative Search Engines are mainly covering bad copies of Google. The reason is, that (1) no semantics/meaning of the content is being extracted by most of the “alternatives” and (2) they don´t focus on special domains. Therefore Google won´t be topped in the next few years… But, if you take a look at Cognition Search you will find a really interesting new way to search for information (or is it at this stage even knowledge?): First you can select a special domain, you want to search in, second you can select resources and then a really helpful way to formulate your search phrase will amaze you…

Finally the Semantic Web became real…

I feel a bit enthusiastic. I´ve just explored dbpedia using it´s comfortable search functionality. And I feel somehow a bit released. What I´ve seen is a great application of semantic web technologies!