e-Social Science and Evidence-Based Policy Assessment : Challenges and Solutions

Peer reviewedPreprin

A Semantics-based User Interface Model for Content Annotation, Authoring and Exploration

The Semantic Web and Linked Data movements with the aim of creating, publishing and interconnecting machine readable information have gained traction in the last years. However, the majority of information still is contained in and exchanged using unstructured documents, such as Web pages, text documents, images and videos. This can also not be expected to change, since text, images and videos are the natural way in which humans interact with information. Semantic structuring of content on the other hand provides a wide range of advantages compared to unstructured information. Semantically-enriched documents facilitate information search and retrieval, presentation, integration, reusability, interoperability and personalization. Looking at the life-cycle of semantic content on the Web of Data, we see quite some progress on the backend side in storing structured content or for linking data and schemata. Nevertheless, the currently least developed aspect of the semantic content life-cycle is from our point of view the user-friendly manual and semi-automatic creation of rich semantic content. In this thesis, we propose a semantics-based user interface model, which aims to reduce the complexity of underlying technologies for semantic enrichment of content by Web users. By surveying existing tools and approaches for semantic content authoring, we extracted a set of guidelines for designing efficient and effective semantic authoring user interfaces. We applied these guidelines to devise a semantics-based user interface model called WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) which enables integrated authoring, visualization and exploration of unstructured and (semi-)structured content. To assess the applicability of our proposed WYSIWYM model, we incorporated the model into four real-world use cases comprising two general and two domain-specific applications. These use cases address four aspects of the WYSIWYM implementation: 1) Its integration into existing user interfaces, 2) Utilizing it for lightweight text analytics to incentivize users, 3) Dealing with crowdsourcing of semi-structured e-learning content, 4) Incorporating it for authoring of semantic medical prescriptions

IMPACTS in natural language generation NLG between technology and applications : workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany July 26-28, 2000

Instructional text, because it is a useful and relatively constrained sub-Ianguage, has been a popular target for research-oriented generation systems. This work has demonstrated that existing technology is adequate for generating draft instructions; the problem, as is typical of generation work in general, has been with the acquisition of domain and lexicogrammatical knowledge. This acquisition task is a formidable barrier to the practical use of generation technology. The Isolde project attempts to address this problem by extracting parts of the required knowledge from existing models and by building tools to tailor what is extracted into a form suitable for generation

IMPACTS in natural language generation NLG between technology and applications : workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany July 26-28, 2000

Instructional text, because it is a useful and relatively constrained sub-Ianguage, has been a popular target for research-oriented generation systems. This work has demonstrated that existing technology is adequate for generating draft instructions; the problem, as is typical of generation work in general, has been with the acquisition of domain and lexicogrammatical knowledge. This acquisition task is a formidable barrier to the practical use of generation technology. The Isolde project attempts to address this problem by extracting parts of the required knowledge from existing models and by building tools to tailor what is extracted into a form suitable for generation

Melody: A Platform for Linked Open Data Visualisation and Curated Storytelling

Data visualisation and storytelling techniques help experts highlight relations between data and share complex information with a broad audience. However, existing solutions targeted to Linked Open Data visualisation have several restrictions and lack the narrative element. In this article we present MELODY, a web interface for authoring data stories based on Linked Open Data. MELODY has been designed using a novel methodology that harmonises existing Ontology Design and User Experience methodologies (eXtreme Design and Design Thinking), and provides reusable User Interface components to create and publish web-ready article-alike documents based on data retrievable from any SPARQL endpoint. We evaluate the software by comparing it with existing solutions, and we show its potential impact in projects where data dissemination is crucial

Knowledge-Driven Harmonization of Sensor Observations: Exploiting Linked Open Data for IoT Data Streams

The rise of the Internet of Things leads to an unprecedented number of continuous sensor observations that are available as IoT data streams. Harmonization of such observations is a labor-intensive task due to heterogeneity in format, syntax, and semantics. We aim to reduce the effort for such harmonization tasks by employing a knowledge-driven approach. To this end, we pursue the idea of exploiting the large body of formalized public knowledge represented as statements in Linked Open Data