In-Context Annotations for Refinding and Sharing

Annotations support understanding, interpretation, sensemaking and scannability. As valuable as in paper-based contexts, digital online annotations provide several benefits for annotators and collaborators. To further explore the real benefits of online annotations, we implemented a simple Web Annotation tool, SpreadCrumbs, to support our studies. The tool provides a simple annotation mechanism, simulating real-world paper-based annotations. In addition, the tool supports search, sharing capabilities and social navigation. We conducted a series of user studies that empirically demonstrates the benefits of “in-context” annotations for refinding and sharing.

Venue: WEBIST2010 (Selected Papers)

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Eelco Herder, George Papadakis and Wolfgang Nejdl

PDF: kawase-webist-selected2010

Annotations and Hypertrails with SpreadCrumbs – An Easy Way to Annotate, Refind and Share

Annotations have been shown to be an important activity during reading, especially during “active reading”. Annotations support understanding, interpretation, sensemaking and scannability. As valuable as in paper-based contexts, digital online annotations provide several benefits for annotators and collaborators. To study the impact of these benefits we present in this paper SpreadCrumbs, a straightforward Web annotation tool. SpreadCrumbs offers simple annotation’s interactions and metaphors that support most of the users’ annotations needs in the digital environment by enhancing the web experience with “in-context” annotations and providing a unique form of social navigation support with hypertrails. The results of our studies with the tool show the importance of annotations, the empirical outperformance of “in-context” annotations over other methods, and the outcome benefits of supporting social navigation.

Venue: WEBIST2010

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Eelco Herder and Wolfgang Nejdl

The Art of Multi-faceted Tagging – Interweaving Spatial Annotations, Categories, Meaningful URIs and Tags

In this paper we present TagMe!, a tagging and exploration front-end for Flickr images, which enables users to attach tag assignments to a specific area within an image and to categorize tag assignments. We analyze the differences between tags and categories and show how both facets can be applied to learn semantic relations between concepts referenced by tags and categories. TagMe! automatically maps tags and categories to DBpedia URIs to clearly define the meaning. In our experiments we compare different strategies to realize such semantic mappings and show that already lightweight approaches map tags and categories with high precisions (86.85% and 93.77% respectively). We further discuss how multi-faceted tagging helps to improve the retrieval of folksonomy entities. The TagMe! system is currently available at http://tagme.groupme.org

 

Venue: WEBIST2010

Authors:  Fabian Abel, Ricardo Kawase, Daniel Krause, Patrick Siehndel and Nicole Ullmann

 

 

Incremental End-User Query Construction for the Semantic Desktop

This paper describes the design and implementation of a user interface that allows end-users to incrementally construct a query over the information in the Personal Information Management (PIM) domain. It allows semantically enriched keyword queries, implemented in the Semantic Desktop of the NEPOMUK Project. The Semantic Desktop user is able to explicitly articulate machine-processable knowledge, as described by its metadata. Therefore, searching this semantic information space can also benefit from the knowledge articulation within the query. Contrary to keyword queries, where it is not possible to provide semantic information, structured query languages as SPARQL enable exploiting this knowledge explicitly.

Venue:  WEBIST2009

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Enrico Minack, Wolfgang Nejdl, Samur Araújo and Daniel Schwabe

PDF: kawase-webist2009b

A Straightforward Approach for Online Annotations: SpreadCrumbs – Enhancing and Simplifying Online Collaboration.

Countless user studies and everyday observations have shown that individuals make annotations while reading – highlighting, circling and underlining important parts of the text, moreover adding written comments. Since the Web became the biggest accessible source of information, many of the reading activities happens online in the browser. In this sense, it is expected that the individuals would keep their annotation behaviors, provided that the appropriate tools are available. Although several Web annotation projects currently exist, it is difficult to identify the most prominent in the field. With SpreadCrumbs, we simplify the annotations actions and the social navigation support. SpreadCrumbs users can add in-context annotations to any webpage with minimum cognition load, as they would do when reading a paper; in addition SpreadCrumbs enhances online collaboration and provides mechanisms to support social navigation by means of existing social networks. It allows the users to freely express themselves and to add any desirable substance to the resources. Technically, annotations carry valuable information about the content, more than bookmarks or tags, having a greater impact on collaboration and search for re-finding. SpreadCrumbs exploits all these advantages with an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface.

Venue:  WEBIST2009

Authors: Ricardo Kawase and Wolfgang Nejdl

PDF: kawase-webist2009a