Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The display on your cell phone or computer will play a bigger part in the emerging semantic web field, one expert says.

In his report, Semantic Wave 2008, Mills Davis, founder and managing director of Project10X, discusses the emerging display landscape, which he says must be made semantically connected and contextually aware in a world where “the boundaries between the virtual and the real are dissolving” and where we increasingly “are living in a display landscape with ambient information, autonomously communicating devices, and contexts that shift continuously.”

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In this world, the display may be your cell phone that communicates with a bulletin board to send you a context-sensitive ad as you walk down the street, or even a pair of glasses that deliver informative graphics about something you are interested in to your field of view. Whatever the conduit, says Davis, the idea is that as intelligence is increasingly embedded into devices in the physical world, the old-style model of “central planning” to tie all these systems together to inform and transform the user experience is increasingly impractical.

“In a world with that much interaction and that much variability, technology approaches just can’t keep up. There won’t be central planning. Everything has enough intelligence that it can figure itself out and figure how it plays. To do that it has to be able to declare, to expose knowledge about what it is and how it works,” says Davis. And it all has to happen on the fly, without the advance agreement of programmers to make their technologies interconnect.

So, what do semantic technologies have to do with all this? Quite a bit, he says.

“We increasingly expect our devices to be intelligent about what goes on around them, to connect and configure, because we want to focus on the experience, on what we are trying to do, and the content is always networked, it’s all over the place in terms of devices and what we connect to and how we connect. So our underlying world has to be able to keep up with us,” Davis says.

“The technology shift to semantic technologies is the key, because semantic technologies say we represent knowledge like data, independent of being locked in program code. Once we know that the technologies give us the inside story, then on the outside we can try to marshal every trick we can to be able to give a better kind of experience.”

That semantically-driven user experience may also ultimately include innovations in visualization technologies, such as Microsoft’s multi-scale viewing technology, where you can have a complex collection of documents, imagery, video and so on, and quickly and efficiently pan, zoom and navigate in detail through all of it.

“I look at that and say, imagine that dimensionality of content interconnected by meaningful relationships. The semantic space is dying for some multi-resolution, multi-oriented ways of navigation. We love [semantic technology] for content, that is the way we understand it, but it’s the kind of thing where, as you get into complex relationships, you ask, how do I bring them into relief and focus on what is important to me and not be cluttered with what’s not,” he says.

As an example, Davis points to how such technology can be marshaled in the service of semantic web services and Web 2.0 services such as del.icio.us, the social bookmarks manager. “As I get more and more information, I need to deal with more people who think about things in different ways, and somehow I want to make sense of that. What got me about the notion of visualization is that … every time you take an action the screen changes. All those changes of state — each is an opportunity to get lost, to forget something. A good information design is a display that puts things in front of us, where we can get it all at a glance, and that trumps doing state changes,” he says.

Such technologies will be particularly important as that array of connected and contextual information transcends the trivial and it becomes increasingly important to present the right information that is organized the right way and adapts as circumstances change, to bring into relief the information that is important at a certain point in time and quiet the other data. With semantics, users gain control over how they want information visualized–all the far-flung data that gets represented in the context of a particular user’s workflow, or train of thought. Information will make sense because it will be represented not just on the device’s terms but on the user’s terms, according to Project10X.

Project10X has some descriptors for these concepts. It uses the term “dynamic presentation,” to describe technology to allow users to view data in different ways, based on user model, task, decision-making context, and so on, and “information filtering,” which are techniques to help users find structure in available sources enabling them to navigate the information space and select information that is relevant to themselves.

“There are huge opportunities to work with a rich information display that opens up and links to multiple relationships, of dealing with lots of information, and lots of knowledge in ways that make it usable and the experience friendly and fun,” he says.

For similar reasons, Davis is excited about other emerging concepts, such as Microsoft’s PhotoSynth, which Microsoft says lets users view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor, and multi-touch displays that recognize multiple simultaneous touch points and use software to interpret simultaneous touches. The neat thing about Photosynth, according to Project10X, is the real-time scaling. Semantics will allow that with text — if a computer understands the content, then it can summarize or drill deeper. For example, the level of summarization in a newspaper might adjust itself based on explicit preferences as well as the history of a person’s behavior, on a section-by-section basis, perhaps even by article.
And multi-touch, says Davis, “gives you a whole different way of interacting — I can use all my fingers and work that puppy and not be confined to the mouse.”

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