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Too much information and too little
architecture?
- transforming semantic web ideas to IA
Svein Ølnes and Nils Arne Hove
Western Norway Research Institute
Naming things!
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 projects
1. 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
FAQ
related to the
service
Links
related to the
service
Menu
related to the
service
Institutions
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 users
Users 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 the
structure
Content Management Systems
Most 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
Standard systems
- only data resources
exchangeable
Optimal solution
- both semantic
structure and data
resources exchangeable
Portal interface
Portal interface
including menu
Data
resources
Menu
Semantic
structure structure
Data
resources
The middle layer: semantic structure (ontology)
The ontology spectrum: From weak to strong semantics
(Daconta et al....)
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 (use for, use,
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 solution
From 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 solution
Stronger 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
Project
Re
Project Manager
Person
su
lte
di
n
Publication
Author of
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
Project
Re
Project Manager
Re
Person
su
lte
di
n
su
lt o
f
Publication
Author of
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
Menu
Project
R
e
l
a
t
i
o
n
s
Project
manager
Project
participants
Publications
Keywords
Funding
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’s
second 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]
Nils Arne Hove – [email protected]