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

Developments over the last twenty years have fueled considerable speculation about the future of the book and of reading itself. This book begins with a brief historical overview the history of electronic books, including the social and technical forces that have shaped their development. The focus then shifts to reading and how we interact with what we read: basic issues such as legibility, annotation, and navigation are examined as aspects of reading that eBooks inherit from their print legacy. Because reading is fundamentally communicative, I also take a closer look at the sociality of reading: how we read in a group and how we share what we read. Studies of reading and eBook use are integrated throughout the book, but Chapter 5 "goes meta" to explore how a researcher might go about designing his or her own reading-related studies. No book about eBooks is complete without an explicit discussion of content preparation, i.e., how the electronic book is written. Hence, Chapter 6 delves into the underlying representation of eBooks and efforts to create and apply markup standards to them. This chapter also examines how print genres have made the journey to digital and how some emerging digital genres might be realized as eBooks. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses some beyond-the-book functionality: how can eBook platforms be transformed into portable personal libraries? In the end, my hope is that by the time the reader reaches the end of this book, he or she will feel equipped to perform the next set of studies, write the next set of articles, invent new eBook functionality, or simply engage in a heated argument with the stranger in seat 17C about the future of reading. Table of Contents: Preface / Figure Credits / Introduction / Reading / Interaction / Reading as a Social Activity / Studying Reading / Beyond the Book / References / Author Biography

Reading and Writing the Electronic Book

Hypertext systems like NoteCards provide facilities for authoring large networks. But they provide little support for the associated task of making these networks intelligible to future readers. Presentation conventions may be imported from other related media, but because the conventions have not yet been negotiated within a community of hypertext readers and writers, they provide only a partial solution to the problem of guiding a reader through an existing network of information. In this paper, we will discuss how a recent facility, Guided Tours, has been used to organize hypertext networks for presentation. The use of Guided Tours in NoteCards has exposed a set of authoring issues, and has provided us with examples of solutions to the problems associated with on-line presentations.

Guided tours and on-line presentations: how authors make existing hypertext intelligible for readers

In this paper, we discuss the findings of an in-depth observational study of reading and within-document navigation and add to these findings the results of a second analysis of how people read comparable digital materials on the screen, given limited navigational functionality. We chose periodicals as our initial foil since they represent a type of material that invites many different kinds of reading and strategies for navigation. Using multiple sources of evidence from the data, we first characterize readers' navigation strategies and specific practices as they make their way through the magazines. We then focus on two observed phenomena that occur when people read paper magazines, but are absent in their digital equivalents: the lightweight navigation that readers use unself-consciously when they are reading a particular article and the approximate navigation readers engage in when they flip multiple pages at a time. Because page-turning is so basic and seems deceptively simple, we dissect the turn of a page, and use it to illustrate the importance and invisibility of lightweight navigation. Finally, we explore the significance of our results for navigational interfaces to digital library materials

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Turning the page on navigation

Anchored conversations are maintained by a conversation coordinator that retrieves an anchor position from an artifact and maintains a position of a conversation client relative to the retrieved anchor position. The conversations are synchronous and asynchronous communications. The anchors, and hence the conversations may be moved within the artifact or to other artifacts. The conversation clients include detach and re-attach buttons that allow a conversation to be detached and reattached from/to a corresponding anchor. The conversation coordinator manages conversations anchored in any number of different applications. Each conversation is accessible either by invoking an associated anchor within a corresponding artifact (embodied as an ActiveX control, for example), or via the conversation coordinator. A database is connected to each conversation and is a silent participant maintaining a record of the conversation and any metadata regarding the conversation. The database is available for query by a user and/or the conversation coordinator.

Anchored conversations: adhesive, in-context, virtual discussion forums

In the 1970s, Alan Kay and his colleagues at Xerox PARC envisioned a dynamic, interactive electronic book. Now, nearly 30 years later, that vision has become a reality. A new kind of personal information appliance-the reading appliance-is emerging as a tool for serious readers. But is the world ready for reading appliances? The authors believe that these appliances are indeed viable. Advances in mobile hardware have made it possible to build the necessary hardware. Additionally, the Web has created a market for online reading by introducing millions of people to it, and books, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and other printed matter can be produced and read at very low cost. Network based digital libraries increase the availability of information, but people still tend to print the documents to work with them. Electronic book and document readers will neither replace paper nor will they replace desktop computers. Instead, they will occupy their own unique and valuable role in our lives, bringing the paper and computer worlds closer together.

Catherine C. Marshall

Papers

Reading and Writing the Electronic Book

Guided tours and on-line presentations: how authors make existing hypertext intelligible for readers

Turning the page on navigation

Anchored conversations: adhesive, in-context, virtual discussion forums

The reading appliance revolution