Supporting Casual Data-Centric Interactions on the Web
5It is now mainstream thinking that the Web is not merely a web of textual documents, but that these documents contain fine-grained, structured data within (e.g., phone numbers, street addresses, job titles, and even subject/verb/object relationships). Infrastructures and user interfaces need to be built to leverage such structured data to make our use of the Web more effective. My doctoral research, and beyond, focuses on building such user interfaces that can offer immediate values to end-users--those without programming and data modeling skills. In this talk, I describe many tools I have built for end-users to
- extract from the Web structured data for personal use;
- publish to the Web structured data in rich visualizations and browsing interfaces; and
- perform data mash-ups by themselves to meet their individual needs. I will share unique insights from this focus on building web data tools for end-users, and lay out plans for future work.
David Huynh received his doctoral degree from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where his research focused on supporting casual data-centric interactions on the Web. He designed user interfaces and tools that let end-users--those without programming and data modeling skills--extract data from the Web, publish data to the Web, and integrate data from several sources on the Web. His work helped bring Semantic Web technologies and ideas closer to end-users, and communicate the Semantic Web vision in a more immediate, personal, and comprehensible way.