Semantic Web User Interaction at CHI 2008:
Exploring HCI Challenges

Saturday, 5th April, 2008 at CHI2008 in Florence, Italy

Home Description Program Participate Committee Review Criteria SWUI Background

This workshop seeks participation from CHI research and design communities, as well as Semantic Web researchers focused on user interaction techniques. It is the fifth in the Semantic Web User Interaction (SWUI) series, and the first to be organized for CHI. Background on the SWUI workshop series follows at the end of this page.

News

Wednesday, April 2, 2008: SWUI2008 will present a poster at CHI Tuesday from 10:30-11:00.

Friday, March 28, 2008: Program schedule posted.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008: Notifications of accepted papers sent.

Friday, December 14, 2007: Submissions closed.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007: Submission will use the SWUI08 entry in Easychair.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007: Program Committee posted.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007: The submission deadline extended to December 14th. We will publish accepted paper on the CEUR workshop proceedings site.

Workshop description

The goal of the growing SWUI community is to foster collaborative discussions leading to research and projects at the touch-points between advanced HCI research/design and Semantic Web research. The Semantic Web poses unique and interesting challenges for user interaction. We have sufficient exemplars of both tools and approaches now that we can demonstrate the concepts of the space to the CHI community and make it very clear where design/research challenges exist (read more details about Interaction Challenges).

We will make exemplar tools and data sets available to potential participants as a sandbox for them to use in attempting to address or model possible solutions for SWUI challenges.

Goals

The workshop aims to:

Theme

The Semantic Web is not a Web of documents, but a Web of structured and interlinked data. Creating interfaces for interacting with this data is difficult because there is no well-defined web "page" or homogeneous structure to the data. Creating data is at least as important as presenting it, so facilitating efficient and effective data entry is an important aspect of user interaction.

This workshop seeks to identify key challenges in a usability research agenda for the Semantic Web and to explore the contributions that the CHI community can make to address them. We want to gather people from within the CHI community to explore current and future CHI research that fits this problem space, and so invite participants exploring many interaction issues. We invite papers on any relevant topic, including:

In addition, the Linking Open Data project has large interlinked data sets available that designers/researchers may wish to try as test sets for interface experiments. We encourage you to explore these resources.

Agenda

The workshop will start with participants beginning to work together online, collaborating in advance of the workshop to accelerate the discussion process and motivate the refinement of a CHI research agenda. The workshop will be segmented into five parts:

1: Setting the Stage Presentations of three or four position statements selected from accepted submissions, particularly focused on issues that frame the challenges for the participants
2: Plenary discussion Plenary discussion on usability topics arising from the participants? experience and the pre-workshop activities.
3. Breakout session Focus on selected usability topics, followed by reporting back and discussion of findings with everyone.
4. Breakout session Identifying post-workshop activities that build on the usability topics discussed in the first breakout:
  1. Research that extends our understanding of the usability topics.
  2. Designing support tools for future events that explore design themes identified by participants.
5. Summary and next steps Summarize findings and distill them into a CHI research agenda for a usable cyber-infrastructure.

After the workshop, a permanent record of the event will be created and hosted on the workshop website. It is expected that this will be used to prime discussions for future workshops, which will aim to evolve this research agenda. A report will be written up and submitted to ACM.

How to participate

This workshop seeks participation from CHI research and design communities. We are accepting three types of submissions, , which are due by 14th December (see dates below). Acceptance of your submission is required for attendance at this workshop.

  1. Case studies - describing projects and applications that present novel interaction approaches and include discussion of how users are involved in analysis, design, and evaluation. Where possible, demonstrations are encouraged.
  2. Research papers - describing specific research activities in any area that relates to user interaction in structured data environments. Again, where possible, demonstrations are encouraged.
  3. Position papers - articulating a user interaction or methodological position/issue that presents a contribution to workshop discussion, by which we are able to advance the subject overall. Papers that outline bridges/integration between disciplines are encouraged.

Important Dates

Submissions due: (closed) 14 December 2007, 5:00 PM PDT
Notification by: (done) 15 January 2008
Workshop date: 5 April 2008

Format Information

Paper Type # Pages Format
Research Paper or Case Study 8-10 CHI Archive format
Position Paper 3-4 CHI Extended Abstract format

Criteria

Please note what we look for in a paper, as we have criteria relating specifically to the user interaction implications of your work, as well as the user-centered activities and evaluation that has been done, if applicable. We also describe our guidelines for position papers, which are somewhat different than for case studies and research.

Process

Submit your paper using the SWUI08 entry in Easychair. Submissions will be reviewed by the workshop committee. When accepted submissions have been announced, they will be made available on the website; the wiki will be used to support pre- and post-workshop activities. Participants will be invited to comment on submissions and contribute to themes/agenda in preparation for the workshop. This process will be initiated, encouraged and facilitated by the members of the workshop committee.

Contact

Send questions to: swui08(AT)webscience.org. If you would like to help promote this workshop, please email the text CFP.

Publication

CHI does not publish workshop papers in the digital library. SWUI2008CHI will publish the papers on the CEUR workshop proceedings site as previous SWUI workshops, such as EUSW (SWUI05), have done.

Committees

Organizing Committee

Program Committee

What we look for in a paper: review criteria

Case studies and research papers should include, where possible, the following:

Position papers could focus on:

Background on SWUI Workshop Series

The Semantic Web User Interaction workshop series and online community was established by senior researchers and practitioners as a bridge between disciplines that contributes to the development of more usable interaction with the Semantic Web. A range of reference information from five previous workshops is now available (swui.webscience.org), along with a growing cross-disciplinary community (www.webscience.org/swuiwiki). The research challenges for interaction design in this semantic space are also part of the new field of Web Science (see Creating a Science of the Web).

The Web Science Research Initiative has co-sponsored SWUI workshops since 2006.