As the web and the Semantic Web continue to bring data together with increasing applications and published datasets, how are we going to continue to interact with this sea of information?

Talis’ Tom Heath has contributed a column in IEEE’s Internet Computing about the future of people and Semantic Web interaction.

Tom’s article covers  “…some ways in which our interaction with the Web of data might differ from how we interact with the established Web of documents, and what this might mean for both users and producers of Web content.” He emphasises that: “Far from removing humans from the equation, a Web of machine-readable data (the Semantic Web; we also call it the “Web of data”) creates significant challenges and opportunities for human-computer interaction.”

Talis is also helping to organise the Visual Interfaces to the Social and the Semantic Web (VISSW 2009) workshop in Florida to cover topics such as:

• Visual interfaces supporting exploration and/or navigation of unstructured or structured data on the Web
• Visualizing and interacting with semi-structured/linked data on the Semantic Web or the Social Semantic Desktop
• Ontology-based visualization of & interaction with collections of data
• Novel paradigms to interact with textual data, photos, music, videos on mobile devices
• Lightweight components for casual users to publish/share their own contents on the Web
• Real-world use cases
• Lessons learned from intelligent interfaces built to interact with Web-based contents

It’s important that the people who are the ultimate point behind all technological development are kept at the centre of the planning too. Is anyone else working with visualisation of data in their design and development plan?

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