Richtags: Cross Repository Browsing

richtags allows you to search across multiple repositories from numerous institutions covering hundreds of disciplines for research that is of interest to you

Bringing the Semantic Web home: a research agenda for local, personalized SWUI

We suggest that by taking the Semantic Web local and personal, and deploying it as a shared "data sea" for all applications to trawl, new types of interaction are possible (even necessitated) with this heterogeneous source integration. We present a motivating scenario to foreground the kind of interaction we envision as possible, and outline a series of associated questions about data integration issues, and in particular about the interaction challenges fostered by these new possibilities. We sketch out some early approaches to these questions, but our goal is to identify a wider field of questions for the SWUI community in considering the implications of a local/social semantic web, not just a public one, for interaction

The Metadata is the Message

The question "What is Web Science" is still frequently asked - even by authors of papers about Web Science. In this position paper we consider what part of the Web Science cycle makes this cycle emblematically "Web Science" rather than another form of either Law and Technology or Sociology and Technology or Computer Science and HCI. Based on our research developing and evaluating Semantic Web / Web 2.0 applications, and observations of current practice, we suggest that the particularity of Web Science is strongly correlated to a focus on human repurposing of particular Web technologies to support ever more rapid types of increased social contact. Based on this analysis, we ask how Web Science may help understand and shape this phenomenon, and what the implications may be for embracing this focus as a necessary criteria for assessing Web Science relevance of research work

Smart Tea Project

Conference poster. The lab book is a big block to publication@source, if it’s not digital, it’s difficult to share. Most experimental information is recorded in a lab book in a highly personal way. We have created a new analogy to fully understand the use of the lab book and successfully built and evaluated a working electronic replacement

Simplifying knowledge creation and access for end-users on the SW

In this position paper, we argue that improved mechanisms for knowledge acquisition and access on the semantic web (SW) will be necessary before it will be adopted widely by end-users. In particular, we propose an investigation surrounding improved languages for knowledge exchange, better UI mechanisms for interaction, and potential help from user modeling to enable accurate, efficient, SW knowledge modeling for everyone

Integrating musicology's heterogeneous data sources for better exploration

Musicologists have to consult an extraordinarily heterogeneous body of primary and secondary sources during all stages of their research. Many of these sources are now available online, but the historical dispersal of material across libraries and archives has now been replaced by segregation of data and metadata into a plethora of online repositories. This segregation hinders the intelligent manipulation of metadata, and means that extracting large tranches of basic factual information or running multi-part search queries is still enormously and needlessly time consuming. To counter this barrier to research, the “musicSpace” project is experimenting with integrating access to many of musicology’s leading data sources via a modern faceted browsing interface that utilises Semantic Web and Web2.0 technologies such as RDF and AJAX. This will make previously intractable search queries tractable, enable musicologists to use their time more efficiently, and aid the discovery of potentially significant information that users did not think to look for. This paper outlines our work to date

Will this work for Susan? Challenges for delivering usable and useful generic linked data browsers

While we witness an explosion of exploration tools for simple datasets on Web 2.0 designed for use by ordinary citizens, the goal of a usable interface for supporting navigation and sense-making over arbitrary linked data has remained elusive. The purpose of this paper is to analyse why - what makes exploring linked data so hard? Through a user-centered use case scenario, we work through requirements for sense making with data to extract functional requirements and to compare these against our tools to see what challenges emerge to deliver a useful, usable knowledge building experience with linked data. We present presentation layer and heterogeneous data integration challenges and offer practical considerations for moving forward to effective linked data sensemaking tools

AtomsMasher: Personal Reactive Automation for the Web

The rise of "Web 2.0" has seen an explosion of web sites for the social sharing of personal information. To enable users to make valuable use of the rich yet fragmented sea of public, social, and personal information, data mashups emerged to provide a means for combining and filtering such information into coherent feeds and visualizations. In this paper we present AtomsMasher (AM), a new framework which extends data mashups into the realm of context-aware reactive behaviors. Reactive scripts in AM can be made to trigger automatically in response to changes in its world model derived from multiple web-based data feeds. By exposing a simple state-model abstraction and query language abstractions of data derived from heterogeneous web feeds through a simulation-based interactive script debugging environment, AM greatly simplifies the process of creating such automation in a way that is flexible, predictable, scalable and within the reach of everyday Web programmers

Orchestrating musical (meta)data to better address the real-world search queries of musicologists

The dispersal of musicology’s diverse array of primary and secondary sources across countless libraries and archives was once an enormous obstacle to conducting research, but this has largely been overcome by the digitisation and online publication of resources in recent years. Yet, while the research process has undoubtedly been revolutionised, the current situation is far from perfect, as the digitisation of resources has often been accompanied by their segregation—according to media type, date of publication, subject, language, copyright holder, etc.—into a myriad of discrete online repositories, often with little thought having been given to interoperability. Given that musicological research typically cuts across such artificial divisions, this segregation of data means that accessing basic factual information or running multi-part search queries remains endlessly complicated, needlessly time consuming, and sometimes impossible. This barrier to tractability is only exacerbated by the limited capabilities of currently deployed search interfaces. There is one seemingly obvious solution to this query dilemma: enable integrated real-time querying over all the available metadata from as many sources as possible, and allow users to use that metadata to guide their queries. This solution implies that all data that could feasibly be construed as useful, but which is buried in the records, is extracted in some way, and that there is an interaction approach that enables metadata to be explored effectively and allows for the formulation of rich compound queries. The musicSpace project has taken a dual approach towards realising this solution. At the back-end we are developing services to integrate and, where necessary, surface (meta)data from many of musicology’s most important online resources, including the British Library Music Collections catalogue, the British Library Sound Archive catalogue, Cecilia, Copac, Grove Music Online, Naxos Music Library, Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), and Répertoire International des Sources Musicale (RISM) UK and Ireland. While at the front-end, in order to optimise the exploration of this integrated dataset, we are developing a modern web-based faceted browsing interface that utilises Semantic Web and Web2.0 technologies such as RDF and AJAX, and which is based on the existing ‘mSpace’ codebase. Our poster outlines the approach we have taken to importing, enriching and integrating the metadata provided by our data partners, and gives examples of the real-world musicological research questions that musicSpace has enabled

Introducing musicSpace

Musicologists consult a wide variety of data sources in their research, many of which are now available online. However, the segregation of data into numerous discrete repositories, inadequate metadata, insufficient data/search granularity, and poor search UIs are all barriers to the intelligent manipulation of metadata. This means that research questions requiring advanced cross-source filtering on metadata fields or the running of complex multipart search queries have to date been effectively intractable. The experimental ‘musicSpace’ project seeks to enable such questions by integrating access to leading musicological data sources via a faceted browser and by enriching the metadata of our data providers