Section: Application Domains

Human-Data Interaction (HDI) on the Web

We need more interaction design tools and methods for linked data access and contribution. We intend to extend our work on exploratory search coupling it with visual analytics to assist sense making. It could be a continuation of the Gephi extension that we built targeting more support for non experts to access and analyze data on a topic or an issue of their choice. More generally speaking SPARQL is inappropriate for common users and we need to support a larger variety of interaction means with linked data. We also believe linked data and natural language processing (NLP) have to be strongly integrated to support natural language based interactions. Linked Open Data (LOD) for NLP, NLP for LOD and Natural Dialog Processing for querying, extracting and asserting data on the Web is a priority to democratize its use. Micro accesses and micro contributions are important to ensure public participation and also call for customized interfaces and thus for methods and tools to generate these interfaces. In addition, the user profiles are being enriched now with new data about the user such as her current mental and physical state, the emotion she just expressed or her cognitive performances. Taking into account this information to improve the interactions, change the behavior of the system and adapt the interface is a promising direction. And these human-data interaction means should also be available for “small data”, helping the user to manage her personal information and to link it to public or collective one, maintaining her personal and private perspective as a personal Web of data. Finally, the continuous knowledge extractions, updates and flows add the additional problem of representing, storing, querying and interacting with dynamic data. Examples of collaboration and applied projects: QAKIS, Sychonext collaboration, ALOOF, DiscoveryHub, WASABI, MoreWAIS.

Web-augmented interactions with the world: The Web continues to augment our perception and interaction with reality. In particular, Linked Open Data enable new augmented reality applications by providing data sources on almost any topic. The current enthusiasm for the Web of Things, where every object has a corresponding Web resource, requires evolutions of our vision and use of the Web architecture. This vision requires new techniques as the ones mentioned above to support local search and contextual access to local resources but also new methods and tools to design Web-based human devices interactions, accessibility, etc. These new usages are placing new requirements on the Web Architecture in general and on the semantic Web models and algorithms in particular to handle new types of linked data. They should support implicit requests considering the user context as a permanent query. They should also simplify our interactions with devices around us jointly using our personal preferences and public common knowledge to focus the interaction on the vital minimum that cannot be derived in another way. For instance the access to the Web of data for a robot can completely change the quality of the interactions it can offer. Again, these interactions and the data they require raise problems of security and privacy. Examples of collaboration and applied projects: ALOOF, AZKAR, MoreWAIS.