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

/pdf/charting-past-present-and-future-research-in-ubiquitous-2aoexf7fgc.pdf

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

A scanning pen for use in an information management system having multiple modes adapted to scan and process different data types. The scanning pen has an optical scanning head, various user controls, and a wireless link to the information management system. The pen has several input modes of operation governing the interpretation of data received through the scanning head, and feedback on the current input mode is provided to the user through visual, audible, or tactile feedback.

Multi-moded scanning pen with feedback

Hypertext began as a vision of interconnected reference materials [Bush 1945] and literature [Robertson 1998]. These early visions were joined by working systems that supported link-based navigation among documents as well as branching points within (hyper)documents [Engelbart 1984]. As the use of hypertext systems became more widespread, researchers realized that readers could become confused or lost as they navigated large networks [Conklin 1987a]. Systems such as NoteCards [Halasz 1987] addressed this problem by displaying maps of the hypertext's network structure. The success of NoteCards's "browser cards" and other hypertext maps gave rise to systems in which the user's main interaction with the hypertext was through a network map rather than a document viewer. For example, systems such as gIBIS [Conklin 1988] and Aquanet [Marshall 1991] presented a visual network containing typed links and nodes where the types are visually distinguished within the map; the network could be edited and manipulated through this presentation.

Spatial hypertext: an alternative to navigational and semantic links

We studied how people use file sync and sharing services to better understand how early adopters conceptualize their interactions with the cloud. A survey of 106 users provided background information about current use of these cloud storage services and identified 19 people for in-depth interviews. Use cases described in the interviews revealed a hierarchy of concepts that participants needed to master to make full use of these services. Five pivotal concepts demonstrate that users make sense of the cloud as a: personal file repository, shared file repository, personal replicated file store, shared replicated file store, and synchronization mechanism that coordinates among replicas. We propose specific ways in which process transparency and interface scaffolding can help users build a more robust model of cloud services.

/pdf/that-syncing-feeling-early-user-experiences-with-the-cloud-3loab5l97n.pdf

That syncing feeling: early user experiences with the cloud

Many readers annotate passages that are important to their work. If we understand the relationship between the types of marks on a passage and the passage’s ultimate utility in a task, then we can design e-book software to facilitate access to the most important annotated parts of the documents. To investigate this hypothesis and to guide software design, we have analyzed annotations collected during an earlier study of law students reading printed case law and writing Moot Court briefs. This study has allowed us to characterize the relation-ship between the students’ annotations and the citations they use in their final written briefs. We think of annotations that relate directly to the written brief as high-value annotations; these annotations have particular, detectable characteristics. Based on this study we have designed a mark parser that analyzes freeform digital ink to identify such high-value annotations.

http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~shipman/papers/ecdl03xlibris.pdf

Identifying Useful Passages in Documents Based on Annotation Patterns

The research field of digital libraries must be viewed as a union of subfields from a variety of domains combined with new research issues in order to realize its full potential. A clear exposition of the research issues involved has not yet been given. Most approaches to building digital library systems have thus far been limited to addressing specific digital library problems as variations of problems from other fields. This paper presents a taxonomy of digital library elements. Consideration of the elements in this taxonomy helps suggest a variety of issues. Example elements and some issues they suggest are used to populate the taxonomy. The paper continues by presenting a general digital library system architecture. Issues suggested by the taxonomy are shown to have implications at many levels of digital library system architectures for both design and implementation. This is illustrated by considering the implications of one issue (personalizing presentations) at several architectural levels and in the context of a set of current technologies.

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Catherine C. Marshall

Papers

Multi-moded scanning pen with feedback

Spatial hypertext: an alternative to navigational and semantic links

That syncing feeling: early user experiences with the cloud

Identifying Useful Passages in Documents Based on Annotation Patterns

Digital Libraries: Issues and Architectures.