Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

September 23, 2010

KP-Lab Knowledge Practices Lab

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,RDF,Semantic Web,Software — Patrick Durusau @ 7:06 am

KP-Lab Knowledge Practices Lab.

KP-Lab project design and implement a modular, flexible, and extensible ICT system that supports pedagogical methods to foster knowledge creation in educational and workplace settings. The system provides tools for collaborative work around shared objects, and for knowledge practices in the various settings addressed by the project.

Offer the following tools:

  • Knowledge Practices Environment (KPE)
  • The Visual Modeling (Language) Editor
  • Activity System Design Tools (ASDT)
  • Semantic Multimedia Annotation tool (SMAT)
  • Map-It and M2T (meeting practices)
  • The CASS-Query tool
  • The CASS-Memo tool
  • Awareness Services
  • RDF Suite
  • KMS-Persistence API
  • Text Mining Services

Pick any one of these tools and name five (5) things you like about it and five (5) things you dislike about it. How would you change the things you dislike? (General prose description is sufficient.)

September 19, 2010

Chem2Bio2RDF: a semantic framework for linking and data mining chemogenomic and systems chemical biology data

Filed under: Biomedical,Data Integration,Dataset,Health care,Interface Research/Design,RDF,SPARQL,Subject Identity,Uncategorized — Patrick Durusau @ 9:57 am

Chem2Bio2RDF: a semantic framework for linking and data mining chemogenomic and systems chemical biology data

Destined to be a deeply influential resource.

Read the paper, use the application for a week Chem2Bio2RDF, then answer these questions:

  1. Choose three (3) subjects that are identified in this framework.
  2. For each subject, how is it identified in this framework?
  3. For each subject, have you seen it in another framework or system?
  4. For each subject seen in another framework/system, how was it identified there?

Extra credit: What one thing would you change about any of the identifications in this system? Why?

September 16, 2010

UCI Machine Learning Datasets

Filed under: Authoring Topic Maps,Dataset,Interface Research/Design — Patrick Durusau @ 4:12 am

UCI Machine Learning Datasets Collection of 194 datasets (as of 2010/09/14) for machine learning.

Re-purpose to develop/test interfaces to assist in authoring topic maps.

September 13, 2010

A million answers to twenty questions: choosing by checklist

Filed under: Information Retrieval,Interface Research/Design,Topic Map Software — Patrick Durusau @ 6:09 pm

A million answers to twenty questions: choosing by checklist Authors: Michael Mandler , Paola Manzini , Marco Mariotti, Keywords: Bounded rationality, utility maximization, choice function, lexicographic utility.

Mentions:

Checklist users can in effect perform a binary search, which makes the number of preference discriminations they make an exponential function of the number of properties that they use. As a result, an agent who makes a 1,000,000 preference discriminations needs a checklist that is just 20 properties long.

Substitute “identity” for “preference.”

  1. How many discriminations are necessary to identify a subject?
  2. Does the order of discrimination matter?
  3. What properties discriminate more than others?
  4. Do the answers to 1-3 vary by domain? If so, in what way?

Empirical question, unlike ontologies, classifications, cataloging, the answers come from users.

September 12, 2010

Gaming for Topic Maps?

Filed under: Authoring Topic Maps,Interface Research/Design,Topic Map Software,Topic Maps,Usability — Patrick Durusau @ 6:57 pm

Gaming for a Cure: Computer Gamers Tackle Protein Folding describes how over 57,000 “players” bested supercomputers:

Analysis shows that players bested the computers on problems that required radical moves, risks and long-term vision — the kinds of qualities that computers do not possess.

Distributed human contribution to massive information projects is a proven fact. (The reading programme of the OED is an earlier example.)

Can you make mapping large data sets into an interesting game?

For some clues, see: Foldit.

August 31, 2010

One of These Things

Filed under: Authoring Topic Maps,Interface Research/Design,Search Interface,Subject Identity,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 8:57 am

One of These Things could be a theme song for topic maps.

It is also a good idea for a topic map authoring interface.

Say you get ten (10) “hits” back from a search. Add a “checkbox” to each “hit.” Unchecked means same as other unchecked “hits.” Checked means different from the unchecked “hits.”

The “same subject” judgment becomes a collective one of all the users of the search interface. Different “hits” are going to be unchecked in any search return.

Semantic input = Human input.

August 30, 2010

Is search passé?

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Search Engines,Searching,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 4:50 pm

Is search passé? is an intriguing question asked at the Montangue Institute Review for August, 2010. Unfortunately, not being a member, I can’t summarize their answer for you.

It really isn’t that hard to guess some of them. I blogged about Blair and Maron saying twenty-five years ago:

Stated succinctly, it is impossibly difficult for users to predict the exact words, word combinations, and phrases that are used by all (or most) relevant documents and only (or primarily) by those documents, as can be seen in the following examples.

Documents and texts haven’t changed in the last twenty-five years. If anything, the problem has gotten worse due to the volume and variety of material that is now available for searching.

This is a semantic and therefore human judgment problem. Algorithms and “clever” data structures can assist human users in making those judgments, but can’t replace them in the loop.

Imagine a search engine that seeks the assistance of users on semantic issues. As opposed to the skulking around of current search engines and sites. Why not just ask? Politely.

A user-fed search engine with a topic map backend. That could be very interesting.

August 8, 2010

Gephi – The Open Graph Viz Platform

Filed under: Gephi,Graphs,Information Retrieval,Interface Research/Design,Maps,Software — Patrick Durusau @ 3:51 pm

Gephi is an “interactive visualization and exploration platform” for graphs.

From the site:

  • Exploratory Data Analysis: intuition-oriented analysis by networks manipulations in real time.
  • Link Analysis: revealing the underlying structures of associations between objects, in particular in scale-free networks.
  • Social Network Analysis: easy creation of social data connectors to map community organizations and small-world networks.
  • Biological Network analysis: representing patterns of biological data.
  • Poster creation: scientific work promotion with hi-quality printable maps.

I find the notion of interaction with a graph, or in our case a topic map represented as a graph quite fascinating.

Imagine selecting or even adding properties as the basis for merging and then examining those results in an interactive rather than batch process.

Can “drag-n-drop” topic map authoring be that far away?

July 31, 2010

Interface Suggestion for Topic Maps

Filed under: Interface Research/Design — Patrick Durusau @ 6:56 pm

New York Times stories have a feature that could be an interesting presentation option for topic maps.

I can highlight arbitrary text and a question icon appears above it. Select the icon and more information appears about the highlighted text.

I like it because:

  • it offers help, when I ask for it
  • it doesn’t require inline markup

Library use case: I am reading a journal article online and when I select the title of a reference, I should be able to see a link to that article and any related resources. (As opposed to being 3, maybe 4 screens away from the where I can see the cited article and then have to navigate back to the original article.)

As a user I won’t be exposed to topic/association/occurrence or proxies and legends. But if the point is to deliver the latest information across semantic barriers, that’s ok. Right?

******
PS: The New York Times has had this feature for some time. I hadn’t seen it because I usually read the New York Times on the weekends and in hard copy.

July 15, 2010

Designing A Successful Topic Map Interface

Filed under: Interface Research/Design — Patrick Durusau @ 5:34 pm

Eugene Agichtein and Qi Guo have developed:

a new class of search behavior models that also exploit fine-grained user interactions with the search results. We show that mining these interactions, such as mouse movements and scrolling, can enable more effective detection of the user’s search goals.

Their paper, Ready to Buy or Just Browsing? Detecting Web Searcher Goals from Interaction Data describes how light-weight mouse tracking can yield valuable information about users. (Contrast that with expensive eye tracking approaches.)

If you like that paper, see: Inferring Web Searcher Intent Tutorial and the bibliography of publications.

The design of a successful topic map interface is going to start and stop with user preferences. How fast or clever your topic map application may be, if users don’t want to use it, they won’t. That, by the way, is the definition of a unsuccessful application.

June 12, 2010

MURAKAMI Harumi

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Researchers,Search Interface — Patrick Durusau @ 3:48 pm

MURAKAMI Harumi focuses on knowledge sharing and integration of library catalogs.

ReaD An alternative listing to dblp. DBLP lists four (4) publications, ReaD list six (6) plus fifty (50) papers and notes.

dblp

Homepage

Harumi’s (given name, MURAKAMI is the family name) work on Subject World (Japanese only) (my post on Subject World includes English language references) caught my attention because of its visualization of heterogeneous terminology in a library OPAC setting.

Since I am innocent of any Japanese, I am interested in hearing reactions from those fluent in Japanese to the visualization interface. This could also be an opportunity to explore how visualization preferences do or don’t differ across cultural lines.

June 2, 2010

Visualizing Topic Maps

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Topic Map Software,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 3:57 pm

Robert Barta forwarded a link to Protovis: A Graphical Approach to Visualization.

Protovis composes custom views of data with simple marks such as bars and dots. Unlike low-level graphics libraries that quickly become tedious for visualization, Protovis defines marks through dynamic properties that encode data, allowing inheritance, scales and layouts to simplify construction.

Protovis (Javascript + SVG) + topicmap backend + your imagination = The Next Big Thing In Topic Maps?

Examples include maps and a number of other starting points for visualization of data sets.

June 1, 2010

Enhancing navigation in biomedical databases by community voting and database-driven text classification

Filed under: Authoring Topic Maps,Classification,Interface Research/Design,Subject Identity,Usability — Patrick Durusau @ 8:08 am

Enhancing navigation in biomedical databases by community voting and database-driven text classification demonstrates improvement of automatic classification of literature by harnessing community knowledge.

From the authors:

Using PepBank as a model database, we show how to build a classification-aided retrieval system that gathers training data from the community, is completely controlled by the database, scales well with concurrent change events, and can be adapted to add text classification capability to other biomedical databases.

The system can be seen at: PepBank.

You need to read the article in full to appreciate what the authors have done but a couple of quick points to notice:

1) The use of heat maps to assist users in determining the relevance of a given abstract. (Domain specific facts.)

2) The user interface allows yes/no voting on the same facts as appear in the heat map.

Voting results in reclassification of the entries.

Equally important is a user interface that enables immediate evaluation of relevance and, quick user feedback on relevance.

The user is not asked a series of questions, given complex rating choices, etc., it is yes or no. That may seem coarse but the project demonstrates with proper design, that can be very useful.

May 27, 2010

Heterogeneous Collaborations

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Usability — Patrick Durusau @ 10:49 am

Knowledge sharing in heterogeneous collaborations – a longitudinal investigation of a cross-cultural research collaboration in nanoscience by Steffen Kanzler researches the impact of culture on sharing of knowledge.

The take away from this research project for topic maps is that “knowledge sharing” is far more complex than simply saying “share knowledge.”

The technical side of integrating multiple heterogeneous representatives of the same subjects is a worthy research goal.

However, the best topic map engine in the world isn’t very useful if people aren’t motivated to use it.

April 24, 2010

Usability at TMRA 2010?

Filed under: Conferences,Interface Research/Design,Topic Map Software,Usability — Patrick Durusau @ 6:58 pm

The success of topic maps depends upon having interfaces people will want to use.

Let’s request a one-day workshop on usability prior to TMRA 2010.

An overview of usability studies, techniques and literature. Might be a push in the right direction.

Perhaps a usability (HCI – human-computer interaction) track for TMRA 2011?

With case studies from topic map projects and usability researchers.

Impatient? See: HCI Bibliography : Human-Computer Interaction Resources, a collection of over 57,000 documents, plus recommended readings, link collections, etc.

April 22, 2010

A Blogging Lesson For Topic Maps?

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Topic Map Software,Usability — Patrick Durusau @ 2:32 pm

As I was posting a blog entry for today, I thought about how blogging swept around the web. Unlike RDF and topic maps.

One difference between blogging and topic maps is that I can type a blog entry and post it.

I have an immediate feeling of accomplishment (whether I have accomplished anything or not).

And, what I have authored is immediately available for me and others to use.

Contrast that with the “hold your left foot in your right hand behind your back with your left eye closed, squinting through an inverted coke bottle while humming Zarathustra” theoretical discussions. (I am a co-author of the reference model so I think I am entitled.)

Or the “developers know best” cult that has shaped discussions to match the oddities and priorities of a developer view of the world.

An emphasis on giving users an immediate sense of accomplishment, with results they can use immediately could lead to a different adoption curve for topic maps.

Neither the theoretical nor developer perspectives on topic maps have had that emphasis.

A Missing Step?

Filed under: Information Retrieval,Interface Research/Design,Search Interface,Topic Maps,Usability — Patrick Durusau @ 7:36 am

I happened across a guide to study and writing research papers that I had as an undergraduate. Looking back over it, I noticed there is a step in the research process that is missing from search engines. Perhaps by design, perhaps not.

After choosing a topic, you did research, then in a variety of print resources to gather material for the paper. As you gathered it, you wrote down each piece of information on a note card along with the full bibliographic information for the source.

When you were writing a paper, you did not consult the original sources but rather your sub-set of those sources that were on your note cards.

In group research projects, we exchanged note cards so that everyone had access to the same sub-set of materials that we had found.

Bibliographic software mimics the note card based process but my question is why is that capacity missing from search interfaces?

That seems to be a missing step.  I don’t know if it is missing by design, i.e., it is cheaper to let everyone look for the same information over and over, or if it is missing in anticipation of bibliographic software filling the gap.

Search interfaces need to offer ways for us to preserve and share our research results with others.

Topic maps would be a good way to offer that sort of capability.

April 21, 2010

Interfaces and Topic Maps

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Search Interface,Searching,Topic Map Software — Patrick Durusau @ 6:02 pm

When I posted the note about Marti Heart’s new book, Search User Interfaces, in Interfaces and Topic Maps I was thinking about it being relevant for software interfaces to topic maps.

After stewing on it for several days and a close read of Chapter 1, I think it has broader application for topic maps.

Topic maps present information about subjects using a single representative for each subject. And those representatives can record properties and associations entered using different identifications.

That sounds like an interface to me. It presents all the considerations of any “interface” in the usual sense of the word. Does it match the intended user’s understanding of the domain? Is the information of interest to the user? Does it help/hinder the user making use of the information?

The Hearst volume is relevant to topic mappers for two reasons:

First, in the conventional sense of the “user interface” to software.

Second, as a guide to exploring how users understand their worlds.

Both are important to keep in mind when constructing topic software as well as topic maps themselves.

March 21, 2010

Casual Users

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Search Interface — Patrick Durusau @ 6:17 pm

Abraham Bernstein’s Google lecture Making the Semantic Web Accessible to the Casual User (2008) is quite good.

Relevant to topic mappers are his comments on structuration theory and how social structures both make signals meaningful as well as limit what meanings we will see. Topic maps can capture the meaning as seen by multiple parties as well as anyone who can see separate meanings as being attached to the same subject.

An “interactive” search interface tested by Berstein and his group got the highest rating from users. Making users into collaborators in authoring topic maps, asking “Did you mean?,” sort of questions and capturing the results might help capture unanticipated (by some authors) answers as well as increasing user satisfaction.

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