Connecting the dots: a multi-pivot approach to data exploration

The purpose of data browsers is to help users identify and query data effectively without being overwhelmed by large complex graphs of data. A proposed solution to identify and query data in graph-based datasets is Pivoting (or set-oriented browsing), a many-to-many graph browsing technique that allows users to navigate the graph by starting from a set of instances followed by navigation through common links. Relying solely on navigation, however, makes it difficult for users to find paths or even see if the element of interest is in the graph when the points of interest may be many vertices apart. Further challenges include finding paths which require combinations of forward and backward links in order to make the necessary connections which further adds to the complexity of pivoting. In order to mitigate the effects of these problems and enhance the strengths of pivoting we present a multi-pivot approach which we embodied in tool called Visor. Visor allows users to explore from multiple points in the graph, helping users connect key points of interest in the graph on the conceptual level, visually occluding the remainder parts of the graph, thus helping create a road-map for navigation. We carried out an user study to demonstrate the viability of our approach

GEORDi: Supporting lightweight end-user authoring and exploration of Linked Data

The US and UK governments have recently made much of the data created by their various departments available as data sets (often as csv files) available on the web. Known as ”open data” while these are valuable assets, much of this data remains useless because it is effectively inaccessible for citizens to access for the following reasons: (1) it is often a tedious, many step process for citizens simply to find data relevant to a query. Once the data candidate is located, it often must be downloaded and opened in a separate application simply to see if the data that may satisfy the query is contained in it. (2) It is difficult to join related data sets to create richer integrated information (3) it is particularly difficult to query either a single data set, and even harder to query across related data sets. (4) To date, one has had to be well versed in semantic web protocols like SPARQL, RDF and URI formation to integrate and query such sources as reusable linked data. Our goal has been to develop tools that will let regular, non-programmer web citizens make use of this Web of Data. To this end, we present GEORDi, a set of integrated tools and services that lets citizen users identify, explore, query and represent these open data sources over the web via Linked Data mechanisms. In this paper we describe the GEORDi process of authoring new and translating existing open data in a linkable format, GEORDi’s lens mechanism for rendering rich, plain language descriptions and views of resources, and the GEORDI link-sliding paradigm for data exploration. With these tools we demonstrate that it is possible to make the Web of open (and linked) data accessible for ordinary web citizen users

musicSpace: integrating musicology's heterogeneous data sources

A significant barrier to the research endeavours of musicologists (and humanities scholars more generally) is the sheer amount of potentially relevant information that has accumulated over centuries. Whereas researchers once faced the daunting prospect of physically scouring through endless primary and secondary sources in order to answer the basic whats, wheres and whens of history, these sources and the data they contain are now increasingly available online. Yet the vast increase in the online availability of data, the heterogeneity of this data, the plethora of data providers, and, moreover, the inability of current search tools to manipulate metadata in useful and intelligent ways, means that extracting large tranches of basic factual information or running multi-part search queries is still enormously and needlessly time consuming. Accordingly, the musicSpace project is exploiting Semantic Web technologies (Berners-Lee et al., 2001) to develop a search interface that integrates access to musicology’s largest and most significant online resources. This will make previously intractable search queries tractable, thus allowing our users to spend their research time more efficiently and ultimately aiding the attainment of new knowledge. This brief paper gives an overview of our work

Discovery and exploration using musicSpace

Musicologists have to rely upon an extraordinarily heterogeneous body of primary and secondary research sources, even when conducting the most basic exploratory research. Although increasingly available online, data is nevertheless routinely catalogued or stored in numerous discrete databases according to media type (text, image, video, audio) and historical period (contemporary literature/sources, historical literature/sources), yet most musicological research cuts across these artificial divisions; researching Monteverdi’s madrigals, for example, could involve performing essentially the same search several times, because there are several relevant data sources (RISM, Grove, Naxos, RILM, BL Integrated Catalogue and BL Sound Archive). The musicSpace project seeks to integrate access to musicological data sources by providing a single search interface, thereby removing the need for search repetition and reducing inefficiency. The vast increase in on-hand data that comes with database integration both demands and allows for the development of far more sophisticated, intelligent and interactive user interfaces. Accordingly, musicSpace facilitates searching and encourages browsing by displaying search results and parameters using multiple panes, allowing instantaneous paradigmatic shifts in search focus, and employing a detailed subject ontology to enable the semi-automatic construction of complex searches. In this paper we present the musicSpace explorer interface and demonstrate its efficacy. We describe key technologies behind musicSpace to reflect on performance and scalability. In particular, however, we describe how we will be evaluating the system in use for research, and describe our longitudinal study to assess the impact of this integrated approach on artefact discovery and research query support

Applying mSpace Interfaces to the Semantic Web

Ontologies can represent large, multidimensional spaces: classical music, research in computer science in the UK, health care for breast cancer are examples of rich domains. There have been no easy ways to represent meaningful slices through these multidimensional spaces to privilege the parts of the domain that are of interest to a given user. mSpace, an interaction model we describe here, is particularly suited to ontology-based interaction because it is designed to expose and support exploration of relations in a domain. In this paper we propose the formalism for this interaction model to support mapping this kind of user-determined interaction onto a high dimensional space represented by an ontology. The model provides semantic web designers with a means for rapidly prototyping and interrogating the data represented by an ontology. It also and provides a fast, effective UI alternative to keyword search and browsing for users to explore the domain space while maintaining domain context

Trust me, I'm partially right: incremental visualization lets analysts explore large datasets faster

Queries over large scale (petabyte) data bases often mean waiting overnight for a result to come back. Scale costs time. Such time also means that potential avenues of exploration are ignored because the costs are perceived to be too high to run or even propose them. With sampleAction we have explored whether interaction techniques to present query results running over only incremental samples can be presented as sufficiently trustworthy for analysts both to make closer to real time decisions about their queries and to be more exploratory in their questions of the data. Our work with three teams of analysts suggests that we can indeed accelerate and open up the query process with such incremental visualizations

Knowledge-Based Information Fusion for Improved Situational Awareness

This project, part of the UK MOD’s Data and Information Fusion initiative (http://www.difdtc.com), aims to investigate knowledge-based approaches to the problem of information fusion. We show how background domain-specific knowledge, in conjunction with semantic web services, can be used to improve situational awareness in the initiation, planning, coordination and operational deployment, of humanitarian operations, especially when such operations occur against a contextual backdrop of ongoing military conflict. Our approach is based on the exploitation of knowledge technologies developed as part of the Advanced Knowledge Technologies initiative (http://www.aktors.org). Information, harvested from a variety of physically disparate and semantically heterogeneous data sources, is interpreted with respect to formal ontological characterizations of the problem domain to establish a common repository of semantically-rich, conceptual-level representations of real-world events. Reasoning services, deployed over the knowledge repository, are used to intelligently fuse information, taking into account factors such as the level of trust and confidence assigned to specific information sources. Knowledge-rich contingencies that inhere in the target domain are also used to infer missing or incomplete information and form part of the knowledge backdrop to fusion-related activities. In addition to promoting increased situational awareness, we argue that knowledge-based approaches to the problem of information fusion can also facilitate ‘information triage’ by exploiting semantically-enriched characterizations of task contexts and operational roles. Selective attention to information of specific relevance to particular users helps avoid situations of information overload that might otherwise result from the information fusion process. We believe this approach to have general applicability in a wide variety of military contexts

Structuring primitives in the Callimachus component-based open hypermedia system

Driven by the philosophy of the 'primacy of structure over data', Component-Based Open Hypermedia Systems (CB-OHS) present an open set of structure servers providing structural abstractions of different hypermedia domains. To address the emergent requirements and to facilitate the development of structure servers, structure should be handled as a first class entity. We propose patterns for structure, called templates, that define the structural model upon which structure servers operate. We present how structure servers are developed and operate in the Callimachus CB-OHS. Development of structure servers within Callimachus is based on the explicit specification of structure with the use of an atomic structural primitive called the structural element. Explicit structure specification eases the development of structure servers in CB-OHS, making such development less error prone and providing the basis for tailoring domain specific abstractions

Seven Issues, Revisited

It has been 15 years since the original presentation by Frank Halasz at Hypertext'87 on seven issues for the next generation of hypertext systems. These issues are: Search and Query Composites Virtual Structures Computation in/over hypertext network Versioning Collaborative Work Extensibility and Tailorability Since that time, these issues have formed the nucleus of multiple research agendas within the Hypertext community. Befitting this direction-setting role, the issues have been revisited several times, by Halasz in his 1991 Hypertext keynote talk, and by Randy Trigg in his 1996 Hypertext keynote five years later. Additionally, over the intervening 15 years, many research systems have addressed the original seven issues, and new research avenues have opened up. The goal of this panel is to begin the process of developing a new set of seven issues for the next generation of hypertext system. Toward this end, we have convened seven experts on hypertext, and charged them with determining one issue, something deserving significant focus by the research community, and one non-issue, a red herring no longer worthy of consideration. At the end of the panel, the panelists and the audience will vote on which issues they consider to be the most important, and which non-issue is the least important

AKTiveSA: A Technical Demonstrator System for Enhanced Situation Awareness

The issue of improved situation awareness is a key concern for military agencies, promising to deliver strategic advantages in a variety of conflict and non-conflict scenarios. Improved situation awareness can benefit operational effectiveness by facilitating the planning process, improving the quality and timeliness of decisions, and providing better feedback regarding the strategic consequences of military actions. In this paper, we aim to show how a combination of semantic technologies and user interface design initiatives can be used to improve situation awareness in a simulated humanitarian relief scenario. We describe the development of a technical demonstrator system, the AKTiveSA TDS, which integrates a variety of knowledge technologies and visualization components within the context of a unitary application framework. We also describe our approach to scenario development, knowledge acquisition, ontology engineering, and system design. Some specific problems encountered during system development are discussed, e.g. the performance overheads associated with rules-based processing, and potential solution strategies for these problems are presented alongside a description of future development activities