Scholarly Ontologies Project Part of the EPSRC Distributed Information Management Programme

Other ScholOnto Project publications

A Document-Centric Semantic Annotation Environment to Support Sense-Making

Bertrand Sereno

Prototype Internet infrastructures for scholarly publishing are offering powerful new services over the interconnected ideas and arguments in a literature. However, such services depend on documents being semantically annotated with readers' interpretations, which up until now has been a manual process due to the complexity of such analysis. This thesis investigates the challenge of designing computer-support for document annotation in the context of potentially diverse, contested views about a text's significance, as typifies scholarly research. An interaction design approach is followed to progressively understand the dialogue between the end-users and an appropriate annotation environment. A preliminary analysis of the annotators' goals if followed by an experiment to identify the activities performed in this sense-making task, and a desk research phase, in which approaches to support each of these activities are identified. An active document annotation environment (ClaimSpotter) is then presented. It is built on an open and extensible architecture, which can incorporate new text analysis components as required to overlay annotations onto the original text to draw attention to sections, which may be particularly significant. Facilities to filter and navigate the document in novel ways, to record annotations or reuse existing ones, and to provide pointers to related documents and annotations based on connections mediated by semantic annotations are offered. The tool is finally evaluated in an experimental setting, resulting in a dataset which supported quantitative and qualitative analysis of the end-users' products and process. The analysis characterises how the semantic annotation scheme is used by novices and experts, and how the user interface's rendering of system and end-user annotations shapes interaction. The thesis assesses critically the strengths and weaknesses of the work, providing justification for further cycles of the approach, and concluding with research questions meriting further investigation.

Sereno, B. (2006). A Document-Centric Semantic Annotation Environment to Support Sense-Making. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK . Submitted May 2005, Approved July 2006 [http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/KMI-TR-06-13.pdf]

ClaiMaker:Weaving a Semantic Web of Research Papers

Gangmin Li, Victoria Uren, Enrico Motta, Simon Buckingham Shum, John Domingue

The usability of research papers on the Web would be enhanced by a system that explicitly modelled the rhetorical relations between claims in related papers. We describe ClaiMaker, a system for modelling readers' interpretations of the core content of papers. ClaiMaker provides tools to build a Semantic Web representation of the claims in research papers using an ontology of relations. We demonstrate how the system can be used to make inter-document queries.

1^st International Semantic Web Conference. (ISWC2002), June 9-12th, 2002, Sardinia.

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Designing Representational Coherence into an Infrastructure for Collective Sensemaking

Simon Buckingham Shum, Victoria Uren, Gangmin Li, John Domingue, Enrico Motta, Clara Mancini

We discuss issues arising from the design, implementation and first use of a prototype infrastructure for distributed collective practice (IDCP), and reflect upon their intersection with some of the themes emerging from the Paris 2000 IDCP workshop. The problem of maintaining coherence in a distributed system is of central interest to us. We focus on the notion of representational coherence, and consider both process issues (the evolution of a discourse structuring scheme; tracing infrastructural history), and the affordances of the resulting product (uncertainty with respect to the schemešs application; ways to map the topography of the emergent representation, with particular interest in graph theory). Throughout, we highlight issues that could have broader implications for IDCPs.

2^nd International Workshop on Infrastructures for Distributed Collective Practices. San Diego, 6-9 Feb. 2002.

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ScholOnto: An Ontology-Based Digital Library Server for Research Documents and Discourse

Simon Buckingham Shum, Enrico Motta and John Domingue

The internet is rapidly becoming the first place for researchers to publish documents, but at present they receive little support in searching, tracking, analyzing or debating concepts in a literature from scholarly perspectives. This paper describes the design rationale and implementation of ScholOnto, an ontology-based digital library server to support scholarly interpretation and discourse. It enables researchers to describe and debate via a semantic network the contributions a document makes, and its relationship to the literature. The paper discusses the computational services that an ontology-based server supports, alternative user interfaces to support interaction with a large semantic network, usability issues associated with knowledge formalization, new work practices that could emerge, and related work.

International Journal on Digital Libraries, 3 (3) (August/Sept., 2000), Springer-Verlag

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(Consolidates and updates the ECDL'99 paper)

Structuring Discourse for Collective Interpretation

Simon Buckingham Shum and Albert Selvin

This paper reflects on three examples of a discourse-oriented approach to supporting collective interpretation. By this, we mean activities involving two or more people who are trying to make sense of an issue. The common theme linking the examples is that each mediates interpretive activity via a software environment which structures discourse: participants construct their interpretation within a representational framework which in return provides computational services. As a by-product, this persistent trace of the sensemaking process can serve as a collective memory resource for subsequent reinterpretation. Based on the three examples, we draw attention to specific challenges that discourse-structuring technologies raise, and strategies for tackling them. A generic issue emerging from this work is the design of ontologies (representational schemes) by and for communities of practice.

Distributed Collective Practices 2000: Conference on Collective Cognition and Memory Practices. Paris, 19-20 Sept., 2000.

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Case Studies in Ontology-Driven Document Enrichment: Principles, Tools and Applications

Enrico Motta, Simon Buckingham Shum and John Domingue

In this paper we present an approach to document enrichment, which consists of developing and integrating formal knowledge models with archives of documents, to provide intelligent knowledge retrieval and (possibly) additional knowledge-intensive services, beyond what is currently available using 'standard' information retrieval and search facilities. Our approach is ontology-driven, in the sense that the construction of the knowledge model is carried out in a top-down fashion, by populating a given ontology, rather than in a bottom-up fashion, by annotating a particular document. In the paper we give an overview of the approach and we examine the various types of issues (e.g., modelling, organizational and user interface issues) which need to be tackled to effectively deploy our approach in the workplace. In addition we also discuss a number of technologies we have developed to support ontology-driven document enrichment and we illustrate our ideas in the domains of electronic news publishing, scholarly discourse and medical guidelines.

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 2000, 52, (6), 1071-1109.

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