INS2 PhD Research Summary

George Anadiotis
Michiel Hildebrand
Alia Amin
Kateryna Falkovych
Joost Geurts
Stefano Bocconi

Title

PhD Student: George Anadiotis
Starting time: Februari 2006

Interacting with Typed and Linked Data

PhD Student: Michiel Hildebrand
Starting time: November 2005
Research proposal

The semantic web offers an infrastructure for heterogeneous data collections and aims to provide uniform access to this information. A considerable amount of machine-processable collections are already available. A central question in our research is how we can automate the generation of meaningful presentations about these resources, a process that on the current web depends heavily on human designers and domain specialists. In this research I focus on the interaction modalities of a presentation, such as search and navigation. Semantic driven interaction aims to improve the process of finding relevant results by exploiting the domain specific knowledge on the semantic web. I will explore different techniques to determine semantic relevance. In particular, I will explore reasoning in hierarchical, spatial and temporal dimensions.

Semantic Design

PhD Student: Alia Amin
Starting time: October 2005

The semantic web has gathered a lot of interest within the web community because it offers a way for machines to "read" content and "understand" what kind of content it is. Research in this area usually covers topics as information structure or information retrieval. Less attention has been paid ,however, as to how to present semantic information automatically but still in a way that humans can appreciate. Semantic Design research is about automatic presentation of semantic information in a way that is perceivable to humans. This research aims to complement the existing semantic web research by focusing on the users' perspective. Some important issues in this research area are information clustering, information presentation in spatial and temporal dimensions, aesthetics, user profiles and context awareness.

Title

PhD Student: Kateryna Falkovych
Starting time: November 2002

Title

PhD Student: Joost Geurts
Starting time: June 2002

Intelligent Information Retrieval and Presentation in Public Historical Multimedia Databases (I2RP)

PhD Student: Stefano Bocconi
Starting time: January 2002

The work in I2RP concentrates on multimedia applications that give computer users access to historical information in large databases. The ARIA and Adlib databases, developed by the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam, contain thousands of images and several hundred thousand textual database records concerning paintings and works of art. It is not likely that a single design solution for a WWW-page will suit all possible types of access to such a database.

The role of the CWI group within this project is to investigate how the hypermedia content can be rendered in a way that is adapted to the prevailing constraints within the usage context and the actual system hardware used. We will investigate appropriate discourse structures to guide the flow of the presentation and to map these onto hypermedia presentation patterns. This process is driven by high-level hypermedia design rules, which also have to be developed. Research is also required into the realization of the hypermedia patterns in terms of concrete hypermedia presentation formats, such as the W3C recommendation SMIL.

The proposed research will also leverage on the current international developments on Web-based agent-technology and ontologies in the context of the "Semantic Web" (E.g. activities stimulated by European 5th and 6th Framework, DARPA/DAML and W3C). Our research will focus on making these technologies available for the average user.