User Interaction Experience for Semantic Web Information

The Semantic Web project [2] aims to add semantics to the existing World Wide Web. We propose an extension of the Web's user interaction experience to take advantage of the added semantics. This user experience maintains the Web's original navigation paradigm, although all URIs, not just URLs, can be used to address information objects. URIs form the superset of URLs and can name resources other than just those with retrievable contents. Information is displayed in webpage-like presentations in which each UI element is associated with the information object that the element represents. UI elements serve as proxies through which the user can manipulate information objects. Uniform support for direct manipulation complements the Web's navigation paradigm to create an informationcentric environment for interacting with information. In addition, we advocate the use of small cooperative tools over large standalone applications to further promote this information-centric paradigm