Session 1: Ontology Visualization Tools

1. Olivier Bodenreider, National Library of Medicine: Visualization Tools for the Unified Medical Language System (SemNav), the Gene Ontology (GenNav)and RxNorm
   • UMLS – used my NLM (using MESH data), to visualize semantic relationships
2. Catherine Plaisant, HCIL, University of Maryland: Graph visualization
   • SpaceTree – how to see branches of a hierarchical classification tree?
   • Click node to open new branch is an easy-to-read format
   • (Can this be used for site navigation or sitemap?)
   • Unlike MS Explorer, this system will open up and show more branches (as long as it can easily be seen within the existing window)
   • TreePlus – takes clustering (example of animal food chain) and makes it hierarchical
   • Moves branches to show information without becoming cluttered
3. David Wang, MIND Lab, University of Maryland: CropCircles: Topology Sensitive Visualization of OWL Class Hirarchies
   • Ontology visualization is used to view relationships and hierarchies in a usable fashion
   • Class hierarchies – gives users a sense of context when browsing and connects related concepts
   • The problem with hierarchical structures is that it can be very hard t read
   • What happens when there are multiple inheritances?
   • Compared tool to Treemap and Spacetree
     • Spacetree does very well in navigational tasks
     • Spacetree and CropCircles are fairly good at returning to visited node

Session 2: Web and Annotation Tools

1. Tim Finin, eBiquity Lab, University of Maryland Baltimore County: Swoogle: A Semantic Web search engine
   • Swoogle is the effort to make sense of the Semantic Web
   • swoogle.umbc.edu
   • Support Semantic Web developers
   • Searching specialized collections
   • Support Semantic Web tools
   • SPARQL is a language like SQL for the Web
   • Used for the SPIRE project
2. Daniel Krech, MIND Lab, University of Maryland: Redfoot: Content Management for the Semantic Web
   • Started as an RDF store/viewer/editor framework
   • CMS built on Semantic Web technologies
   • Sharing content between CMSs is often laborious
   • Solves problem of sharing and reusing content
   • CMS face helps shield humans from the SW bits intended for machines
   • Redfoot functionality
     • generic editor
     • context management
     • authentication support
     • comments, bookmarks
     • edit content
     • blog
     • recipes, ingredients, DOAP
   • Redfoot built to explore how the SW can be used to analyze terrorist activity
3. Michael Grove, MIND Lab, University of Maryland: Image Annotation on the Semantic Web Discussion
   • PhotoStuff
   • Multimedia ontologies
   • It’s a pain to mark up photos for the web – takes time
   • PhotoStuff takes automated info captured by digital camera
   • Rich opportunity to add a wealth of metadata
   • Use of Natural Language Processing to show additional info in image popups
   • Adds descriptions automatically

Session 3: Semantic Web in Practice

1. Gary Berg-Cross, Building Ontology Patterns for the Semantic Web: Practical Issues
   • Ontologies start with taxonomic pattern
   • Taxonomies can be tangled (cross-applicability)
   • Subsumption
     • Rigidity
     • Identity
     • Unity
     • Dependency
   • Struggle to make an “untangled” taxonomy
   • Ontologies may use meta-properties to distinguish between objects and process
   • Focus on space-region, object, event, time-interval
2. David Zaccagnini, Knowledge Discovery using Semantic Web technologies and text mining in life sciences
   • Text mining and the semantic web
   • Automate the assignment of semantics to unstructured content
   • PubMed example – humans cannot make sense of a resulting hitlist of thousands of hits
   • Their system combines proprietary and public ontologies
   • Tool identifies concepts and adds these concepts into the system
3. Brian Caruso and Brian Lowe, Mann Library, Cornell University: VIVO: An ontology-driven life sciences research portal
   • Attempts to consolidate information about life sciences at Cornell University
   • Results are organized as entities
   • vivo.cornell.edu
4. Duane Degler, IPGems: Current research and trends in interaction design for the Semantic Web
   • “New acquaintances or old friends?” – metaphor to HCI
   • “The doctor’s appointment” – Let user enter into his/her handheld web browser a natural language request that the computer can interpret based on information already known about the user (calendar, contacts, location, time, distance, etc.)
   • The concept of the agent that conducts business on your behalf
   • Concept of trust with the agent – will the agent get it right?

Session 4: Panel Discussion

• Alfredo Morales, Cerebra
• Duane Degler, IPGems
• Walt Truszkowski, Goddard Space Flight Center
• Harry Chen, Image Matters

Walt Truszkowski discussed how his office is using personal web space and applying SM technologies. For example, a user can go to the site (private, employee only) and choose an agent. As this agent a question and the agent will return possible answers.

Harry Chen discussed geospatial information on the SM. GIS has become mainstream with the advent of Google Maps, etc. Any person can access this type of information.

Q: What’s so special about the Semantic Web?

The group discussed how the Semantic Web is growing, but there are growing pains. No conclusions drawn

Semantic Web User Interaction Workshop, November 6, 2006

Tags: [UMCP, HCIL, hci, Semantic Web, workshop, Swoogle, ontology, Partial Recall, OWL, RDF, folksonomy]

Due to the large amount of content, I will be updating this a bit more to fill in the blanks of the later sessions of the day. Check back for more info.

Welcome

Jenny Preece opened the symposium discusssing the College of Information Science and its collaboration with the HCIL. Dr. Preece indicated that the team is very interested in social, collaborative technologies and processes.

Benjamin Bederson continued the welcome, discussing the interdisciplinary nature of the group (psychology, information science, computer science). Web 2.0, he indicated, is succeeding because there us a greater focus on issues of usability, democracy, and user-centric design.

Link to Poster Session Images

International Children’s Digital Library

• reaches 1 million users
• Now has 1000 books freely available
• www.childrenslibrary.org

Keynote: Ben Shneiderman

Creativity Support Tools: A Grand Challenge for HCI

• Software must support the creative process
• A new research direction is emerging
• Dramatically improved creativity support tools are possible
• Multi-dimensional in-depth long-term case-studies (MILCs)
• Guidelines for design are emerging

Session 1: Visual Interfaces

1. Improving the search experience by organizing Web search results with meaningful and stable categories
• Video shown to display a search engine that shows a results list but also has a left-hand column that organizes search results into meaningful category overview
• types:
  • textual
  • graphical
  • stable
  • clustering
• www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/categorizedoverview
2. Supporting Library Scholars with Data Mining and Visual Interfaces
• Data mining interfaces can be designed to be accessible to literary scholars
• Visual interface for data mining
  • Accessible
  • Provocational
• www.noraproject.org
• (Reminds me of Mood Project)
3. Network Visualization to Support Exploration of Supreme Court Decision Patterns
• Analyzed 2000+ court cases (data sets)
• Ability to visually restrict or expand district information
• www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/nvss
4. Balancing Systematic and Flexible Exploration of Social Networks
• Example: National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism (START)
• Compiled a dataset of allknown terrorist attacks (currently 70,000 over 27 years)
• “Hot” and “Cold” colors emphasize geographic locations that are either volatile or peaceful
• www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/socialaction
5. NetLens: Iterative Exploration of Content-Actor Network Data
• There are challenges to network visualization
• NetLens freely downloadable and used with any database?
• Heuristic evaluation by NIST
  • Navigation is easy and required little training
  • UI widgets are understood by most people
  • The metaphor for the visualization is understandable
• www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/netlens

Session 2: Public Access

1. When Children are Digital Librarians: Reader Response to the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL)
• Look at the role of children’s emotion, response, and book recommendations
• Fantastic search model for children (click image to sort by book jacket color, book size, etc.)
• www.childrenslibrary.org
2. Children Sharing Stories with ICDL Communities: A Pilot Study in Mexico and Maryland
• Develop communities for children to discuss books across cultures
• Identity representation was a big hit
  • Girls drew pictures of themselves
  • Boys drew pictures of things they enjoy (e.g., soccer ball, monster, etc.)
• www.childrenslibrary.org
3. Collaborative Educational Technology to Enhance Grade School Field Trips
• Tangible Flags- physical colored flag with embedded RFID tag
• Students place flags at physical locations and use tablet pcs to draw what they see near the flag
• Students use the tablet pc to read the RFID of a flag to load information that a previous student may have added
• Students can collaboratively add notes and edits to the drawing using their own tablet pc
• Although collaborative, only a few students at a time can collaborate
4. The Promise and Perils of New Voting Technologies
• Remember the Florida voting problems?
• Team reviewed the usability and accuracy of a variety of voting methods/systems
• Touch Screens proved to be the most usable and accurate
• www.cs.umd.edu/~bederson/voting

Session 3: Interaction and Devices

1. Thumb Movement: Designing for One-Handed Use of Small Devices
• Analyzed mobile devices -how easily can you interact with them using one hand?
• Looked at various cellphone styles and various PDA styles
• Created molds of these devices just to represent the shape and size of the device (removed existing buttons and controls)
• Added LED diodes to record thumb movements
• Determined that side to side movement isbest – avoid repetitive diagonal movements
• Determined that for larger devices (PDAs), strive for interaction targets toward the center of the device (e.g., Palm Treo 700w)
• www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/mobile/
2. Eye Tracking as Implicit Feedback for Improving Search Results
• Eye movement indicates visual interest
• Visual interest = cognitive interest
• Tracked users focus on paragraphs of text usinglarge cumbersome head unit
• In the future, will use an eye tracking device that is embedded in a computer monitor – Tobii
3. ModelCraft: Capturing Freehand Annotations and Edits on Physical Models
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4. A Pen-top Interface for Interactive Paper
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5. Hardware Support for Digital Document Navigation
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6. Mobile Mapping and Personal Driving History
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Tags: [Partial Recall, hci, umcp, hcil, conference, visual interfaces, social software, Ben Shneiderman, Jenny Preece, cognition]

The University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab is hosting a symposium on June 1 and 2.

Day 1 is the actual symposium, with a keynote given by Ben Shneiderman. In addition, Jenny Preece is one of two people giving the welcome. Jenny is the Dean of the College of Information Studies, where I graduated from. She is also an expert on online communities, a topic I am very much interested in. Day 2 will showcase some tutorials and workshops. I will be attending the Humans and the Semantic Web workshop. For those attending the workshop, we needed to submit a position paper. My paper is entitled, “Ontologies and Folksonomies: Can They Coexist?”

I will try to blog the event if I have time (and a connection to the Internet).

Tags: [UMCP, HCI, Partial Recall, ontology, folksonomy, semantic web, Jenny Preece, Ben Shneiderman]