Interactive Information Access

- before 2009 called Semantic Media Interfaces -

Leader of the group Interactive Information Access (INS2): Lynda Hardman.

While people have access to huge amounts of information, they typically need only a very limited subset of it to carry out their current task. In addition, with the introduction of data repositories with potentially expandable schema (for example those available in knowledge repositories on the Semantic Web), the core challenge is to find and present relevant subsets of these for a particular end user. Our goal is to support human users in obtaining the correct information, in the appropriate amount, relevant to the task at hand and presented in the appropriate way. This should minimise the cognitive overhead of the user, thus contributing to minimising the time for a user to complete her task.

Our aim is to develop methods to explore and confirm appropriate models of storage, selection, organisation and presentation of information to the user.

Our methods are based on developing solutions for linking descriptive semantics with the media assets that contain the information interpretable by the end user. Tools include Semantic Web knowledge description languages and associated tools. In parallel, empirical studies are used to understand the needs of users with their specific information needs. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations are carried out. Our current emphasis is on expert access to cultural heritage information owned by museums (MultimediaN Eculture project) and on end-user access to news content owned by news providers (NewsML work carried out in the context of K-Space).

Research history
CWI's semantic media interfaces group has been involved with the development of models and authoring systems for multimedia and hypermedia since the early 1990's. Results of this work include the Amsterdam Hypermedia Model, contributions to the W3C SMIL 1.0, SMIL 2.0, and XHTML recommendations, the hypermedia authoring system GRiNS, the CWI spin-off company Oratrix. More recent work resulted in the development of the multimedia transformation engine Cuypers and the rhetorial video documentary engine Vox Populi.

Members of the group have been active in W3C's Synchronized Multimedia Working Group, ISO's MPEG7 DDL Working Group and W3C's Multimedia Semantics Incubator Group.

Members
Corrado Boscarino, Lynda Hardman, Vera Hollink, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Arjen de Vries

Key publications
Key publications of the group Interactive Information Access

Group publications
Publications of the group Interactive Information Access in CWI repository

Cooperation
Participations and cooperations of Interactive Information Access

Browse

This group is part of the cluster Information Systems (INS).