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Too much information and too little architecture?
- transforming semantic web ideas to IA
Svein Ølnes and Nils Arne HoveWestern Norway Research Institute
Naming things!
Gary Larson’s famous cartoon showing a manpainting names on the dog, the cat, the house in order to ”clear up a few things”.
The drawing points to the essential naming of thingswhen talking about semantic structures
Content• Background
• The problem
• Three layer architecture
• The middle layer: semantic structure (ontology)
• An intermediate solution: simple categorisations
• The optimal solution: stronger semantics
• A semantic structure modelled with Topic Maps
• Search and semantic structure
• Conclusion
Background projects1. The development of a new portal for a local municipality
• a typical web development project• cooperation with information architects• semantic structures developed in parallel with interface prototypes• a CMS provider to implement the prototypes
• the CMS not able to support the semantic structures
2. The development of a new web site for our own research institute• semantic structure first, as the start of the work with an information
architecture • implementation in a CMS supporting semantic structures
Municipality prototype: Good interface, but...Information
about the service
Persons related to the
service
Links related to the
service
FAQ related to the
service
Institutionsrelated to the
service
Menu related to the
service
... no description of the underlying structure ...
• Non-existing or too weak model of the semantic structure• many IA projects underestimate the work with a proper semantic
structure (= an ontology)• general lack of knowledge in this area• the customer is not willing to pay for the extra effort, he/she wants to see
prototypes at an early stage
• The semantic structure is often not properly implemented• most CMS’s today lack proper support for implementing semantic
structures• the implementation is often left to the CMS provider and the customer
... creates problems for the usersUsers have problems finding relevant information:
• Internal search is where the web sites often fall apart• Internal search on web sites does not provide relevant results• the search engine does not have enough information about the
results it presents (it does not know whether it is a person, a service, a news article etc.)
• This problem is often solved isolated from the main problem which is a lack of proper semantic structure• to improve search results supplementary structures are often coded
in the search application, or “hard coding” is used to overrule the automatic search result
• Weak semantics makes relationship between information elements obscure• relations must be given a description other than ”see also” or
”related article”, and the description must be obtained from thestructure
Content Management SystemsMost CMS’s:• have poor support for semantic structures
• do not distinguish between different kinds of articles:• all articles are treated as news and look like news• ”when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
• do not handle different types of relations• the only type of relations are ”related article”, “see also” • any other type of relation must be provided by “hard-coding”
• articles often based on the same style sheet (= same attributes on all articles)
• everything is tied to the menu• menu structure = site architecture• the menu is “misused” to also handle relations between articles
Three layer architecture
Portal interfaceincluding menu
Data resources
Standard systems- only data resourcesexchangeable
Portal interface
Data resources
Menustructure
Semanticstructure
Optimal solution- both semanticstructure and dataresources exchangeable
The middle layer: semantic structure (ontology)
The ontology spectrum: From weak to strong semantics (Daconta et al.: “The Semantic Web”)1. Vocabulary
• plain text documents/HTML pages – almost no semantic structure
2. Controlled vocabularies (weak semantic structure)• adding metadata to the information
3. Taxonomies• metadata and hierarchy
4. Thesauri• metadata, hierarchy and a limited set of relations (BT, NT,
related to ...) 5. Stronger semantic structures/ontologies
• metadata, [hierarchy], any relations
Most semantic structure is presently implemented in the portal application and thus not directly available
An intermediate solutionFrom no semantic structure to weak semantic structure:
• Use a semantic structure to categorise articles (= “naming things!”)• this article is about ‘persons’ (e.g. article type = ‘person’)• this article is about ‘projects’ etc.
• Make the internal search “aware” of the semantic structure• this is where most of the benefit appears
• But,• still no description of relations• a solution that does not scale very well
Optimal solutionStronger semantic structures/ontologies:
• Building the middle layer on standards• semantic web standards:
• Topic Maps (ISO 13250)• RDF/OWL (W3C recommendation)
• This will give a more flexible solution• enables exchange of information• reuse of both information and structure• enables inferencing on the information
• Enables both categorisation of articles and description of associations between different categories of articles
Middle layer modelled with Topic Maps
3 topic types/classes:person, project and publication
3 association types/relations: project manager, resulted in, and author of
Middle layer modelled with Topic Maps
3 topic types/classes:person, project and publication
3 association types/relations: project manager, resulted in/result of, and author of
Prototyping ”Research institute”Top
Projectparticipants
Menu
Project manager
Publications
Keywords
Funding
Project
Rela tions
A Topic Maps based portal
Other portals based on semantic web
Official Norwegian governmental portal Fuzzzy.com – web 2.0/tagging
Norwegian Broadcast Company –a W3C Semantic Web Use Case
The municipality of Bergen, Norway’ssecond largest city
Example of search: with semantic structure
Example of search: no structure
Conclusion• Information architects need to model stronger semantic structures
• Every web project/IA project must start with the construction of an ontology
• Information architects must ensure that the semantic structure is implemented in the CMS in a proper way
End of presentation
Thanks!
Contact information
Svein Ølnes – [email protected] Arne Hove – [email protected]