From SWUIWiki

Contents 1 Relevant events 2 Relevant links 3 People who have expressed interest so far 4 List of issues 4.1 Good practices 4.2 Repeat Web 1.0 usability work for the Semantic Web 4.3 Guidelines 5 Next steps for us

Relevant events

• ISWC2007 Events
  • Minutes of BOF in at ISWC2007
  • ISWC2007 Sunday Tutorial: User Centered Design for the Semantic Web
  • ISWC2007 Tuesday 4pm Session Research 5: User Interaction
  • ISWC2007 Wednesday 2pm Session Research 10: Natural-Language Interfaces
• Semantic Web Challenge at ISWC2007
  • Tuesday 4pm Presentations
  • Tuesday 6pm Demos
  • Thursday 4-5pm Award and Closing Ceremony: Winners announced
• SWUI workshop at CHI2008 (submissions Dec 14!)

Relevant links

• This wiki started with a public-semweb-ui@w3.org email thread.
• ISWC2007 home page
• Adrian Walker's slides on "e-Government Implications"

People who have expressed interest so far

• Emmanuelle, Sidar
• Tom Heath, Open U
• Knud Hinner, Deri
• M Daquin, Open U
• Hugh Glaser
• Roberto García, Univ. Lleida
• J Chetwynd
• Richard Cygniak
• Ivan Herman
• Adrian Walker
• Jacco van Ossenbruggen
• Laurian Gridinoc, Open U
• your name here?

List of issues

Good practices

New semantic web tools are being released (primarily RDF based but Ontology editors and othe semantic technologiesr too) that look as if they are promising and useful but little or no 'usability good practices' is in place to make such applications useful to those who have never seen one before (ie the majority of the intended users)

People (non developers) dont know

• what to do with it
• how to do it

Repeat Web 1.0 usability work for the Semantic Web

2. you can look at all the usability issues that once existed about web 1.0, great advances have been made there in term of internet usability/accessibility, so that now even grandparents can manage to check emails without prior knowledge - we are in a similar phase with semantic web applications, we (non developers, otherwise intelligent - users with different operational business and other IT background not RDF) need/want to learn how to use them and give feedback to developers, but they cant. They also feel a little helpless and stupid in the process, typical symptoms of poor usability

Semantic technologies are now designed to be used by specialists (understandable as these are mostly alpha/beta, but as they become more and more pervasive, also their usability must increase)

Guidelines

General lack of guidelines, how to's and comprehensive list of tutorials and support for people who would like to use the things, as well as for developers who dont know what seem to understand what the issues are. Sometimes semantic web tools appear mysterious in appearance and functionality to the uninitated.

In the BOF we could aim to expand the above list of 'issues' with inputs from different viewpoints, identify what is the cause of lack of usability, discuss possible initiatives that could increase usability, including possibly some futuristic web based application/service to collect all the user comments from semantic test environments and gather them in a repository that could be used to develop tutorials (support the users) as well as guidelines (help the developers develop more friendly tools following appropriate guidelines). Anything else that interested contributors feel should be added/discussed

Next steps for us

• IUI2008 in January?
• CHI2008 in April, including the SWUI workshop?
• ISWC2008?