Materials Glossary Java Applet

For users to create their own software it is first necessary for them to be able to access and manipulate information held in an ontology. To support this, user interfaces for managing ontologies were investigated. The example below is of thesaurus management using an applet (Sun Developer Network, 2007), which allows a user to find information by means of a word-based search or by pressing a labelled button. The applet shows an abstract of the web page contents, and links to the full page. This and other examples from the early thesis work are explained in Hale et al (2001) and Hale et al (2002) as the first prototypes for user driven programming.

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Adapted from a Sun Java Applet - http://java.sun.com/applets/.

This example was used to test the use of taxonomies for 'supplying a controlled vocabulary', 'site organization', 'expectation setting', 'browsing support', 'search support', and 'sense disambiguation support'. These are 6 of the 7 uses of simple ontologies explained by McGuinness (2003). Within this research time was spent improving the use of representations for these purposes, particularly those using a web interface. It was also important to work on making such representations more maintainable, extendable, and machine readable. Kemp and Buckner (1999) developed a taxonomy of guidance for hypermedia design making use of a design structure (the taxomomy) to relate information on design. The simple ontologies used within the research website were an attempt to deal with the problems that users experience with being lost in web-based systems. Otter and Johnson (2000) explain that these problems are - not knowing where to go next, knowing where to go but not knowing how to get there, and not knowing where they are in the overall structure of the document. Nilsson (2002) also explains about "surfing-sickness", where a person loses the context of the information and does not know how they got to it. For this reason tree based menus were constructed for this research that could be created automatically from a centralized ontology. Cayzer (2004) discusses tree based web navigation. The examples in this chapter explain this research. Eventually some ideas were abandoned and others re-used. - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/#InteractiveExamples.

References

Cayzer, S. 2004. Semantic Blogging and Decentralized knowledge Management. Communications of the ACM. Vol. 47, No. 12, Dec 2004, pp. 47-52. ACM Press.

Kemp, B., Buckner, K., 1999. A taxonomy of design guidance for hypermedia design. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/09535438/1999/00000012/00000002/art00009 - Interacting With Computers, 12(2), pp 143-160.

McGuinness D. L., 2003. Ontologies Come of Age. In: Dieter Fensel, Jim Hendler, Henry Lieberman, and Wolfgang Wahlster, ed. Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential. MIT Press, 2003.

Nilsson, M., Palmér, M., Naeve, A., 2002. Semantic Web Metadata for e-Learning - Some Architectural Guidelines - WWW2002 Hawaii USA.

Otter and Johnson, 2000. Lost in hyperspace: metrics and mental models, Interacting with Computers, Volume 13, Number 1, September 2000, pp. 1-40(40).

Internal Links

More Information can be found at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/#VisualisationandInteraction.

Other Prototypes and Examples can be found at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/#InteractiveExamples.

Developed by Peter Hale, 2006. The University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.

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© 2005 University of the West of England, Bristol (except acknowledged extracts from newspapers, journals, etc)