Semantic Visualization
• What do we mean when we talk about
visualization?
- Understanding data
- Showing the relationships between elements of
data
• Overviews
• Changes
• The context of information can be set with
semantic information
A Geospatial Web
• A set of semantic ontologies to organize
information
• Searching semantic data can be contextually
driven
- Does searching become browsing with semantic
information defaults?
- Personalized results based on matching the
semantics of your situation & the data?
• People, interfaces, search systems &
information resources
Beyond Keywords
• Semantics take us beyond keywords
- How far beyond?
- Exposing metadata?
• “the structure of the posted data is flat”
- What about existing & derived metadata?
• GML helps with geospatial information
- But users still need to understand what they’re
looking at
- Subtleties of understanding are complex
• Time * Place vs. Time / Place
Lakes in Maine
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•
•
•
Find “lakes in Maine”
User sees lakes by counties in Maine
Matching US geometry & lake information
Distinctions between lakes inside Maine &
actual lake location
• Understanding of what a lake is, typical uses
of lake data, etc.
• Users will have more facets of their query
exposed, with some good initial guesses as to
their intention with the query
Geospatial Semantics
• Natural language with minimum markup
- HTML, XHTML, META tags, naming conventions
• Simple metadata
- XML, Dublin Core, Links
• Data models
- RDF for relationships, better interfaces
• Logical semantics
- Automated reasoning to determine
correspondence among queries & real-world
entities
• Is this easy (easier) because it is real world
based?
A Geospatial format
• Another flavor of XML to help with this
complex relationship
- Geospatial format for queries
- Assessment metrics for matching queries & noting
precision & recall
• What is the best format for storing geo
semantics?
• What is the best way to present this to users?
- Map coordinates?
- Drill down?
A Conversational Web Mapping
• There are many ways to map information
• Non-physical methods are the most
challenging, but also potentially the most
interesting
- From an additive, metadata view
• Netscan project
- “Qualitative data in a quantified setting”
- Is it possible to extract semantics from this?
• What would you need to know to make use of
this data?
Semantic Structures?
• Usenet is organized into groups
• These groups fit a complex taxonomy
• Mostly text
- Annotations (threads)
- Date & Time
- User ID
• Variance among groups
- Posting vs. Conversing
- Topic influences post types
- Contributions
Let’s take a look at a map
Are groups changing?
• Alt.binaries is growing, changing usenet from
conversation to file exchange
• Areas of usenet are popular, and shifting
-
SPAM
Alt groups change
More users online = more potential conversations?
Corporate or intended use of groups
Special purposes & replies
Semantic Interactions
• How are people changing online?
• What is the metadata than can be derived &
shown or used semantically?
• How can you understand posting conventions
automatically?
- Question, reply, trolls, flamer, chatter
• Does this analysis help us understand the
conversations visually?
- What about any kind of understanding, even
generally?
Blog Conversations
• Blogs provide us with some extra semantics
by default
TagClouds
• What could be better with tag clouds?
-
Delicious
NY Times
Flickr
Yahoo News
Semantic Interfaces or Maps?
-
Tag Cloud Gallery
5 Alternate Ways to Browse Amazon.com
Many Eyes – Semantic
MindRaider (Outliner)
Bioinformatics