Section: Research Program

Users Modeling and Designing Interaction on the Web

Wimmics focuses on interactions of ordinary users with ontology-based knowledge systems, with a preference for semantic Web formalisms and Web 2.0 applications. We specialize interaction design and evaluation methods to Web application tasks such as searching, browsing, contributing or protecting data. The team is especially interested in using semantics in assisting the interactions. We propose knowledge graph representations and algorithms to support interaction adaptation, for instance for context-awareness or intelligent interactions with machine. We propose and evaluate Web-based visualization techniques for linked data, querying, reasoning, explaining and justifying. Wimmics also integrates natural language processing approaches to support natural language based interactions. We rely on cognitive studies to build models of the system, the user and the interactions between users through the system, in order to support and improve these interactions. We extend the user modeling technique known as Personas where user models are represented as specific, individual humans. Personas are derived from significant behavior patterns (i.e., sets of behavioral variables) elicited from interviews with and observations of users (and sometimes customers) of the future product. Our user models specialize Personas approaches to include aspects appropriate to Web applications. Wimmics also extends user models to capture very different aspects (e.g. emotional states).