Duane Degler of Design for Context did a session on state of the art in semantic web UI. Here are some of the insights I took from his talk:
- The semantic web community has come to realize that without good UI, the metadata enables cool things, but doesn’t provide quality and productivity to normal users.
- “It’s all about the relationships” between data elements.
- Ontology -> describes the complex web of relations.
- Semantic, automated filtering/browsing instead of human categorization.
- Topic maps are an alternative representation to RDF.
- Some cool demos: IRS Tax Map, Simile (MIT) “Exhibit” (two layered time graphs and faceted filtering), Faviki (tagging using Wikipedia topics; a controlled tagging vocabulary), Fleck (server stored annotation), Calais (WordPress tagging extension)
Duane keeps a set of his writings and pointers to demos (a bit outdated at the moment) at IPGems.
