Please be welcome to Eetu Mäkelä’s public defence of his doctoral thesis on View-Based User Interfaces for the Semantic Web. The defence will take place on Friday, the 26th of November, at 12 noon at the TUAS Building (Otaniementie 17, Espoo), Auditorium TU2. The defence will also be broadcast live over the internet here.
The content of the dissertation to be presented deals with the benefits that may be gained from publishing data using Semantic Web techniques, and how these benefits can be realized. Particular emphasis is placed on how originally varied and heterogeneous data can be linked to each other, and what new functionalities this enables for an end-user. Also discussed are how these functionalities are best implemented in user interfaces and system architecture.
The work in the thesis focuses mostly on publishing cultural heritage information in national level integrated portals. During the work two such were produced: www.museosuomi.fi and www.kulttuurisampo.fi. Of these, MuseumFinland was awarded both the Semantic Web Challenge award of the international research community as well as the Finnish prime minister’s honorary mention for the most innovative web application of the year. Other content areas discussed are e-Health, e-Government, e-Learning and e-Commerce.
As examples of the user interfaces developed during the work, data exploration interfaces were implemented that can answer questions such as “How beard fashions changed in the end of the 19th century?”, “which themes were the most popular in Finnish fiction in the year 2007?”, “what are the most popular colors of peoples’ underwear?” and “how are the Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela and the French emperor Napoleon the first connected to each other?”.
The viewpoint of an information provider is catered for in the section of the thesis discussing production and publishing architectures for Linked Open Data, as well as the problems faced in integrating vastly heterogeneous data.
The dissertation is available for download here (pdf).
Preceding the dissertation, the opponent, professor Lora Aroyo (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) will give a guest lecture at the same auditorium at 10:15-11:00 on “User Interaction and Personalization with Semantics”.
Abstract:
In this talk I will present three use cases of how the use of semantics (1) brings added value and (2) introduces new challenges for the user interaction and personalization. The main focus of this research is to investigate how knowledge patterns in Linked Open Data can help in the process of consuming semantically enriched Web content. The three use cases are explored in the context of three projects NoTube (personalized access to TV content using content patterns in Linked Open Data), CHIP (personalized access to enriched museum collections using content patterns in domain ontologies), WAISDA? (interactive tagging game to collect user-generated data and use it for annotation of audio-visual collections). I will also demonstrate some of the prototypes developed for these use cases.
Project links:
http://notube.tv
http://chip-project.org
http://waisda.nl
Short bio:
Lora Aroyo is now an assistant professor at the Web & Media Group, VU University Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Currently she is technical coordinator for the EU Project NoTube, lead researcher for the VU in the EU Project PrestoPrime and for the CATCH project Agora. Previously she was also project coordinator for the CATCH project CHIP. She has written numerous publications in leading conferences and journals the fields of personalization, user modeling and semantic web. She has also been involved in the organizations of various conferences, workshops and journal special issues, most notably as PC Chair for ESWC2009 and ISWC2011, Conference Chair for ESWC2010, and as member of the editorial board of the UMUAI journal and the Semantic Web Journal. Her main research interests are in facilitating personalized access to Web content collections by utilizing Semantic and Social Web technologies for user modelling and recommendations.