RDF Authoring Environments for End Users
The Semantic Web enables powerful agent-facilitated negotiation and retrieval functionality by enabling the transfer of machine-readable metadata across the Internet. This next generation Web presupposes the mass availability of metadata such as clothing measurements, busy/free time calendar indications, and dietary restrictions, meaning that users will need to provide more information to their systems to reap the aforementioned benefits. Current tools for capturing ontology-encoded metadata from users are ill-suited for this task, requiring knowledge of ontologies or the ability to navigate generalized abstract directed graphs. In this paper we present user interface paradigms based on the idea that an object can be represented on the screen by an extensible family of views. We present several strategies for allowing users to create RDF metadata by manipulating views, including a drag and drop form-based property editor and a viewbased graph editor. Users benefit from being able to interact with objects by means of views suited to the context at hand, such as photograph representations or human-readable summary descriptions, rather than text fields with plaintext strings or URIs. Finally, we discuss a strategy for enabling advanced users to construct ontologies and customized views and to distribute them to users unfamiliar with modeling knowledge, ultimately giving end users intuitive interfaces for entering metadata.