The term “Linked Data” refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. These best practices have been adopted by an increasing number of data providers over the last three years, leading to the creation of a global data space containing billions of assertions— the Web of Data. In this article, the authors present the concept and technical principles of Linked Data, and situate these within the broader context of related technological developments. They describe progress to date in publishing Linked Data on the Web, review applications that have been developed to exploit the Web of Data, and map out a research agenda for the Linked Data community as it moves forward.

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Linked Data - the story so far

The emergence of ubiquitous computing as a new design paradigm poses significant challenges for human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design. Traditionally, HCI has taken place within a constrained and well-understood domain of experience—single users sitting at desks and interacting with conventionally-designed computers employing screens, keyboards and mice for interaction. New opportunities have engendered considerable interest in “context-aware computing”—computational systems that can sense and respond to aspects of the settings in which they are used. However, considerable confusion surrounds the notion of “context”—what it means, what it includes and what role it plays in interactive systems. This paper suggests that the representational stance implied by conventional interpretations of “context” misinterprets the role of context in everyday human activity, and proposes an alternative model that suggests different directions for design.

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What we talk about when we talk about context

The proliferation of computing into the physical world promises more than the ubiquitous availability of computing infrastructure; it suggest new paradigms of interaction inspired by constant access to information and computational capabilities. For the past decade, application-driven research on abiquitous computing (ubicomp) has pushed three interaction themes:natural interfaces, context-aware applications,andautomated capture and access. To chart a course for future research in ubiquitous computing, we review the accomplishments of these efforts and point to remaining research challenges. Research in ubiquitious computing implicitly requires addressing some notion of scale, whether in the number and type of devices, the physical space of distributed computing, or the number of people using a system. We posit a new area of applications research, everyday computing, focussed on scaling interaction with respect to time. Just as pushing the availiability of computing away from the traditional desktop fundamentally changes the relationship between humans and computers, providing continuous interaction moves computing from a localized tool to a constant companion. Designing for continous interaction requires addressing interruption and reumption of intreaction, representing passages of time and providing associative storage models. Inherent in all of these interaction themes are difficult issues in the social implications of ubiquitous computing and the challenges of evaluating> ubiquitious computing research. Although cumulative experience points to lessons in privacy, security, visibility, and control, there are no simple guidelines for steering research efforts. Akin to any efforts involving new technologies, evaluation strategies form a spectrum from technology feasibility efforts to long-term use studies—but a user-centric perspective is always possible and necessary

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Charting past, present, and future research in ubiquitous computing

An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

Intelligent Automated Assistant

Cognitive engineering

Utility, serendipity, and the pleasure of encountering what we save relies on more than search alone when using PIM tools.

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Keeping encountered information

Social media, by its very nature, introduces questions about ownership. Ownership comes into play most crucially when we investigate how social media is saved or archived; how it is reused; and whether it can be removed or deleted. We investigate these social media ownership issues using a Mechanical Turk survey of Twitter users; the survey uses open-ended questions and statements of belief about realistic Twitter-based scenarios to give us a window onto current attitudes and beliefs. Our findings reveal that respondents take a liberal attitude toward saving and storing the tweets that they encounter. More caution is exercised with republishing the material, and still more with sharing the material among friends and associates. Respondents approach removal of this type of lightweight social media most cautiously. The material's provenance and the respondents' relationship to the material (whether they are the author or subject) has considerable bearing on what they feel they can do with it.

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Social media ownership: using twitter as a window onto current attitudes and beliefs

With the growth of the Web as a public information resource, users need workspaces to support the collection, evaluation, organization, and annotation of the materials they retrieve. These analytic workspaces should be designed for both the casual and professional analyst, keeping in mind that different environments may be appropriate for each type of use. In this paper, we derive a set of requirements from observations and reports on the use of information workspaces, coupled with observations of people performing analytical tasks. These workspace requirements include: (1) support for performing multiple simultaneous tasks; (2) a variety of activity-based connections to information resources; (3) tailorable and manipulable reduced document representations; and (4) visualizations to help users manage screen space. We explore the trade-offs implied by these requirements using our implementation of multiple focus fisheye views as we have integrated them into the VIKI workspace.

Beyond location: hypertext workspaces and non-linear views

In this article I explore the implications of the four challenges presented in Part 1 – (1) accumulation, (2) distribution, (3) digital stewardship, and (4) long-term access – and discuss some promising technological directions and requirements for each. To address issues associated with accumulation, I examine the question of what we should keep and how we should designate and assess value of digital objects. Distribution raises the question of where we should put our digital belongings; here I propose the creation of a catalog of distributed stores. Digital stewardship raises the fundamental question of maintenance outside of the institution; in this case, I discuss a range of curation services and mechanisms. Finally, there is the question of how we will find these items we have stored long ago; I look at some new access modes that have begun to appear. I then wrap up the discussion by reflecting on what it means to lose some of our digital assets and how we might think of digital archiving technologies.

Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving, Part 2: Implications for Services, Applications, and Institutions

A Web browser provides the ability to separate content and hyper-links from a Web page and provides a list of the links for viewing on a mobile device display screen, and once a link is selected using the mobile device, a services portal link is provided to the mobile device display to provide selection of services to be performed on the selected link, such as faxing or printing. Further, the services are made link dependent, or user dependent so that specific services can be displayed depending on factors such as the availability of services provided specifically from a Web page owner for link dependent services, or for the location of a user relative to a print service provider for user dependent services.

Catherine C. Marshall

Papers

Keeping encountered information

Social media ownership: using twitter as a window onto current attitudes and beliefs

Beyond location: hypertext workspaces and non-linear views

Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving, Part 2: Implications for Services, Applications, and Institutions

Service portal for links separated from Web content