Web Augmentation is usually applied to add, remove and change Web sites’ functionalities, content, and presentation. Content- based Web Augmentation is commonly performed by integrating con- tent from an external Web site into the current one. In this article, we explore the use of the Semantic Web as a source of information to be incorporated to any Web site, aiming to simplify the development of Web Augmentation based on Semantic Web data. Our approach allows end-users without any programming skills to build Web Augmentation scripts that takes some information from the current Web page, and produce new related information gathered from the Semantic Web. This article introduces a pipeline process for building SWA and an End-User Development tool called SWAX to create augmentation layers without the need for any programming or SW skills.Publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, vol. 11553).Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Firmenich, Sergio

Sottile, Cristian

Torres, Diego

El Servicio de Difusión de la Creación Intelectual

An End-User Semantic Web Augmentation tool
Cristian Sottile1,2, Sergio Firmenich1,3, and Diego Torres1,2,3
1 LIFIA, Facultad de Informa´tica, UNLP, Argentina
2 Comisio´n de Investigaciones Cient´ıficas de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina
3 Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cient´ıficas y Te´cnicas, Argentina
4 Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnolog´ıa, UNQ, Argentina
Abstract. Web Augmentation is usually applied to add, remove and
change Web sites’ functionalities, content, and presentation. Content-
based Web Augmentation is commonly performed by integrating con-
tent from an external Web site into the current one. In this article, we
explore the use of the Semantic Web as a source of information to be
incorporated to any Web site, aiming to simplify the development of
Web Augmentation based on Semantic Web data. Our approach allows
end-users without any programming skills to build Web Augmentation
scripts that takes some information from the current Web page, and
produce new related information gathered from the Semantic Web. This
article introduces a pipeline process for building SWA and an End-User
Development tool called SWAX to create augmentation layers without
the need for any programming or SW skills.
Keywords: Semantic Web · Web Augmentation · User Interface
1 Introduction
The Semantic Web [1, 7] (SW) provides sources of semantic information useful
to be interchanged among computer systems with a standard model called RDF.
Most of RDF data sources allow being queried through a SPARQL endpoint.
Web Augmentation (WA) is an approach to improve Web applications by
incorporing new functionalities. A common strategy is to enhance them on the
client side [2], after it is received from the server.
Semantic Web Augmentation (SWA) is a particular type of WA where the
SW provides the new information. The SW is accessed via a SPARQL endpoint
or RDF API to extract information pieces, which are then adapted and inserted
into the DOM structure on the client side. The Website ends up including the
original contents plus the new ones from the SW. In this article we tackle with a
kind of SWA where the new information is related to the content of the Website.
SWA developers need to be skilled in client-side and SW technologies [6].
This article introduces both a pipeline process for building SWA and an End-
User Development tool called SWAX to create augmentation layers without the
need for any programming or SW skills.
Section 2 describes the pipeline process for building SWA. Section 3 intro-
duces the End-User development tool designed as a Web Browser extension.
2 C. Sottile et al.
Related work is analyzed in Section 4, and Section 5 details conclusions and
further work.
2 The process
This section explains the process for building SWA. It is a pipeline process where
each component receives as input the output of its predecessor, and consists of
three main steps:
– Data extration: We stated that our kind of SWA will involve the informa-
tion present in the desired Website. In this step, these data are extracted
from the DOM.
– Data fetching: Given a generic SPARQL query and the extracted data, this
step fills the generic query with the data, producing a specific query for each
one, and then run these queries against a SPARQL endpoint, obtaining new
information from the Semantic Web.
– Insertion: Given an HTML template and the fetched data, this steps gen-
erates specific HTML elements by filling the templates with the data, and
inserts them in the Website, performing the Web Augmentation.
3 An End-User Development Tool for SWA
This section introduces an End-User Development Tool for building SWA, which
we call SWAX5. It is a Web browser extension whose functionality is based upon
the process described in Section 2, and allows to build a WA script based on the
current Website. It can be enabled in any Web page, initiating a wizard-like UI to
configure the augmentation in a sequence of intuitive steps. The result is a script
that is general enough to augment all Web pages whose DOM structure and
semantics are similar to the original one. One configuration, several executions.
Additionally, the script can be executed to test its results.
As a guide example, we will take the IMDb6 website, and we will aim to
improve the films Websites by adding the amount of Oscars every cast member
won. The “The Godfather II” page on IMDb7 could be used to produce a script
to augment this and every IMDb film page. In the following, we introduce the
tool’s sequence of steps using this example.
1. Extraction: First, the user selects what DOM elements from the Web page
will be used as data input in the semantic augmentation, by enabling the
selection mode and clicking them. Continuing with our example, these would
be actor’s and actress’ names. Then, the user defines how to extract the
information contained in the selected DOM element (e.g., the text content
or the HREF) and the tool shows the value extracted from it.
5 Source code and video-tutorials at https://github.com/cfsottile/swa-extension
6 IMDb stands for Internet Movie Database. http://imdb.com
7 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071562/
An End-User Semantic Web Augmentation tool 3
2. Querying: The semantic query that will retrieve the new information from
the SWmust be defined. There are different mechanisms to help the SPARQL
query building with visual tools. We delegate it to Visual SPARQL Builder
(VSB) [3], which provides an intuitive interface to assist users in vocabulary
and properties detection. Our tool provides an augmentation layer also on
VSB for communication purposes. The resulting SPARQL query will be ex-
ecuted against the DBpedia SPARQL endpoint, obtaining the augmentation
data.
3. Building: This step involves the definition of the HTML template that will
be used to insert the augmentation data to the Web page. The user must
write the HTML code including references to the augmentation data; how-
ever, the template may consist of only references, thus not being mandatory
for the user to know any HTML. References to augmentation data are pre-
sented as buttons that, when clicked, insert the reference into the template
input.
4. Insertion: This step configures the weaving of the HTML augmentation
elements built in the previous step. The user must choose the wanted places
in the Web page to inject them. This is done similarly to the Selection step,
by selecting HTML elements from the DOM.
5. Saving: The user will define a set of URLs where the augmentation should be
applied. In our cast example, this would be https://www.imdb.com/title/*.
Then, the user can save the augmentation script, which will be applied every
time a URL within the set is opened, or try it in the current page for testing
purposes. Figure 1 shows the cast section of the “The Godfather II” page
before and after the augmentation.
Fig. 1: Case study: Oscars
4 Related Work
Rico et al. [6] introduced a tool to allow Web developers with no SW skills
to create templates capable of handling semantic data. WOA [4] presents an
4 C. Sottile et al.
approach for the creation of WA layers by firstly annotating Web contents with
semantic tags. Most SW improvements of non-SW applications are based on
the semantification of Web pages from social efforts [8, 5]. For the best of our
knowledge, there exist no end-user tools for defining the weaving of information
extracted from the SW in the current context of Web browsing.
5 Conclusions and Further Work
The SW is in a mature state since many years. However, it is not common to see
tools for allowing Web users communities to consume all this infrastructure. In
this paper, we present a pipeline processs for building SWA, and an End-User
Development tool based upon it called SWAX to create augmentation layers. The
approach allows end-users without any programming skills to produce generic
WA scripts that allow for enriching the contents of groups of Web pages.
The first future work is the need for an exhaustive evaluation. The promi-
nent prototype demonstrated well behavior and easy to use augmentation tasks
in laboratory tests. Nonetheless, we are designing usability tests with a group of
developers. Additionally, more extraction and insertion strategies are in develop-
ment, as well as user experience improvements. Also, there are several SPARQL
query builders like VSB that could be adapted for SWAX.
References
1. Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., Lassila, O.: The semantic web. Scientific american
284(5), 28–37 (2001)
2. Bouvin, N.O.: Unifying strategies for Web augmentation. In: Proceedings of the
tenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and hypermedia: returning to our diverse
roots: returning to our diverse roots. pp. 91–100. ACM (1999)
3. Eipert, L.: Metadatenextraktion und vorschlagssysteme im visual sparql builder. In:
Cunningham, D.W., Hofstedt, P., Meer, K., Schmitt, I. (eds.) INFORMATIK 2015.
pp. 1925–1936. Gesellschaft fu¨r Informatik e.V., Bonn (2015)
4. Firmenich, S., Bosetti, G.A., Rossi, G., Winckler, M., Barbieri, T.: Abstracting and
structuring web contents for supporting personal web experiences. In: Web Engi-
neering - 16th International Conference, ICWE 2016, Lugano, Switzerland, June
6-9, 2016. Proceedings. pp. 77–95 (2016)
5. Kahan, J., Koivunen, M.R.: Annotea: an open RDF infrastructure for shared Web
annotations. In: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on World Wide
Web. pp. 623–632. WWW ’01, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2001)
6. Rico, M., Corcho, O., Mac´ıas, J.A., Camacho, D.: A Tool Suite to Enable Web
Designers, Web Application Developers and End-users to Handle Semantic Data.
Semantic-Enabled Advancements on the Web: Applications Across Industries: Ap-
plications Across Industries p. 123 (2012)
7. Shadbolt, N., Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W.: The semantic web revisited. IEEE intelli-
gent systems 21(3), 96–101 (2006)
8. Torres, D., Diaz, A., Skaf-Molli, H., Molli, P.: Semdrops: A Social Semantic Tagging
Approach for Emerging Semantic Data. In: Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent
Technology (WI-IAT), 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on. vol. 1,
pp. 340–347. IEEE (2011)


English

An End-User Semantic Web Augmentation tool

T Berners-Lee

Sergio Firmenich

N Shadbolt

Crossref

An End-User Semantic Web Augmentation Tool

SEDICI - Repositorio de la UNLP

Servicio de Difusión de la Creación Intelectual

An End-User Semantic Web Augmentation toolCristian Sottile1,2, Sergio Firmenich1,3, and Diego Torres1,2,31 LIFIA, Facultad de Informa´tica, UNLP, Argentina2 Comisio´n de Investigaciones Cient´ıﬁcas de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina3 Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cient´ıﬁcas y Te´cnicas, Argentina4 Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnolog´ıa, UNQ, ArgentinaAbstract. Web Augmentation is usually applied to add, remove andchange Web sites’ functionalities, content, and presentation. Content-based Web Augmentation is commonly performed by integrating con-tent from an external Web site into the current one. In this article, weexplore the use of the Semantic Web as a source of information to beincorporated to any Web site, aiming to simplify the development ofWeb Augmentation based on Semantic Web data. Our approach allowsend-users without any programming skills to build Web Augmentationscripts that takes some information from the current Web page, andproduce new related information gathered from the Semantic Web. Thisarticle introduces a pipeline process for building SWA and an End-UserDevelopment tool called SWAX to create augmentation layers withoutthe need for any programming or SW skills.Keywords: Semantic Web · Web Augmentation · User Interface1 IntroductionThe Semantic Web [1, 7] (SW) provides sources of semantic information usefulto be interchanged among computer systems with a standard model called RDF.Most of RDF data sources allow being queried through a SPARQL endpoint.Web Augmentation (WA) is an approach to improve Web applications byincorporing new functionalities. A common strategy is to enhance them on theclient side [2], after it is received from the server.Semantic Web Augmentation (SWA) is a particular type of WA where theSW provides the new information. The SW is accessed via a SPARQL endpointor RDF API to extract information pieces, which are then adapted and insertedinto the DOM structure on the client side. The Website ends up including theoriginal contents plus the new ones from the SW. In this article we tackle with akind of SWA where the new information is related to the content of the Website.SWA developers need to be skilled in client-side and SW technologies [6].This article introduces both a pipeline process for building SWA and an End-User Development tool called SWAX to create augmentation layers without theneed for any programming or SW skills.Section 2 describes the pipeline process for building SWA. Section 3 intro-duces the End-User development tool designed as a Web Browser extension.2 C. Sottile et al.Related work is analyzed in Section 4, and Section 5 details conclusions andfurther work.2 The processThis section explains the process for building SWA. It is a pipeline process whereeach component receives as input the output of its predecessor, and consists ofthree main steps:– Data extration: We stated that our kind of SWA will involve the informa-tion present in the desired Website. In this step, these data are extractedfrom the DOM.– Data fetching: Given a generic SPARQL query and the extracted data, thisstep ﬁlls the generic query with the data, producing a speciﬁc query for eachone, and then run these queries against a SPARQL endpoint, obtaining newinformation from the Semantic Web.– Insertion: Given an HTML template and the fetched data, this steps gen-erates speciﬁc HTML elements by ﬁlling the templates with the data, andinserts them in the Website, performing the Web Augmentation.3 An End-User Development Tool for SWAThis section introduces an End-User Development Tool for building SWA, whichwe call SWAX5. It is a Web browser extension whose functionality is based uponthe process described in Section 2, and allows to build a WA script based on thecurrent Website. It can be enabled in any Web page, initiating a wizard-like UI toconﬁgure the augmentation in a sequence of intuitive steps. The result is a scriptthat is general enough to augment all Web pages whose DOM structure andsemantics are similar to the original one. One conﬁguration, several executions.Additionally, the script can be executed to test its results.As a guide example, we will take the IMDb6 website, and we will aim toimprove the ﬁlms Websites by adding the amount of Oscars every cast memberwon. The “The Godfather II” page on IMDb7 could be used to produce a scriptto augment this and every IMDb ﬁlm page. In the following, we introduce thetool’s sequence of steps using this example.1. Extraction: First, the user selects what DOM elements from the Web pagewill be used as data input in the semantic augmentation, by enabling theselection mode and clicking them. Continuing with our example, these wouldbe actor’s and actress’ names. Then, the user deﬁnes how to extract theinformation contained in the selected DOM element (e.g., the text contentor the HREF) and the tool shows the value extracted from it.5 Source code and video-tutorials at https://github.com/cfsottile/swa-extension6 IMDb stands for Internet Movie Database. http://imdb.com7 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071562/An End-User Semantic Web Augmentation tool 32. Querying: The semantic query that will retrieve the new information fromthe SWmust be deﬁned. There are diﬀerent mechanisms to help the SPARQLquery building with visual tools. We delegate it to Visual SPARQL Builder(VSB) [3], which provides an intuitive interface to assist users in vocabularyand properties detection. Our tool provides an augmentation layer also onVSB for communication purposes. The resulting SPARQL query will be ex-ecuted against the DBpedia SPARQL endpoint, obtaining the augmentationdata.3. Building: This step involves the deﬁnition of the HTML template that willbe used to insert the augmentation data to the Web page. The user mustwrite the HTML code including references to the augmentation data; how-ever, the template may consist of only references, thus not being mandatoryfor the user to know any HTML. References to augmentation data are pre-sented as buttons that, when clicked, insert the reference into the templateinput.4. Insertion: This step conﬁgures the weaving of the HTML augmentationelements built in the previous step. The user must choose the wanted placesin the Web page to inject them. This is done similarly to the Selection step,by selecting HTML elements from the DOM.5. Saving: The user will deﬁne a set of URLs where the augmentation should beapplied. In our cast example, this would be https://www.imdb.com/title/*.Then, the user can save the augmentation script, which will be applied everytime a URL within the set is opened, or try it in the current page for testingpurposes. Figure 1 shows the cast section of the “The Godfather II” pagebefore and after the augmentation.Fig. 1: Case study: Oscars4 Related WorkRico et al. [6] introduced a tool to allow Web developers with no SW skillsto create templates capable of handling semantic data. WOA [4] presents an4 C. Sottile et al.approach for the creation of WA layers by ﬁrstly annotating Web contents withsemantic tags. Most SW improvements of non-SW applications are based onthe semantiﬁcation of Web pages from social eﬀorts [8, 5]. For the best of ourknowledge, there exist no end-user tools for deﬁning the weaving of informationextracted from the SW in the current context of Web browsing.5 Conclusions and Further WorkThe SW is in a mature state since many years. However, it is not common to seetools for allowing Web users communities to consume all this infrastructure. Inthis paper, we present a pipeline processs for building SWA, and an End-UserDevelopment tool based upon it called SWAX to create augmentation layers. Theapproach allows end-users without any programming skills to produce genericWA scripts that allow for enriching the contents of groups of Web pages.The ﬁrst future work is the need for an exhaustive evaluation. The promi-nent prototype demonstrated well behavior and easy to use augmentation tasksin laboratory tests. Nonetheless, we are designing usability tests with a group ofdevelopers. Additionally, more extraction and insertion strategies are in develop-ment, as well as user experience improvements. Also, there are several SPARQLquery builders like VSB that could be adapted for SWAX.References1. Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., Lassila, O.: The semantic web. Scientiﬁc american284(5), 28–37 (2001)2. Bouvin, N.O.: Unifying strategies for Web augmentation. In: Proceedings of thetenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and hypermedia: returning to our diverseroots: returning to our diverse roots. pp. 91–100. ACM (1999)3. Eipert, L.: Metadatenextraktion und vorschlagssysteme im visual sparql builder. In:Cunningham, D.W., Hofstedt, P., Meer, K., Schmitt, I. (eds.) INFORMATIK 2015.pp. 1925–1936. Gesellschaft fu¨r Informatik e.V., Bonn (2015)4. Firmenich, S., Bosetti, G.A., Rossi, G., Winckler, M., Barbieri, T.: Abstracting andstructuring web contents for supporting personal web experiences. In: Web Engi-neering - 16th International Conference, ICWE 2016, Lugano, Switzerland, June6-9, 2016. Proceedings. pp. 77–95 (2016)5. Kahan, J., Koivunen, M.R.: Annotea: an open RDF infrastructure for shared Webannotations. In: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on World WideWeb. pp. 623–632. WWW ’01, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2001)6. Rico, M., Corcho, O., Mac´ıas, J.A., Camacho, D.: A Tool Suite to Enable WebDesigners, Web Application Developers and End-users to Handle Semantic Data.Semantic-Enabled Advancements on the Web: Applications Across Industries: Ap-plications Across Industries p. 123 (2012)7. Shadbolt, N., Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W.: The semantic web revisited. IEEE intelli-gent systems 21(3), 96–101 (2006)8. Torres, D., Diaz, A., Skaf-Molli, H., Molli, P.: Semdrops: A Social Semantic TaggingApproach for Emerging Semantic Data. In: Web Intelligence and Intelligent AgentTechnology (WI-IAT), 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on. vol. 1,pp. 340–347. IEEE (2011)

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