Re: SWUI Workshop at CHI? (was RE: [CHI-ANNOUNCEMENTS] CFP CHI 2008: Workshop/Course submissions due 15 June)

Hi there,

I thought I would just add a tiny bit of personal experience with CHI/ 
HCI confs and wksp proposals. Together with a couple of (HCI/SW)  
people I have been involved in a submission on the theme of "UI +  
SemWeb" a while back (guess it was for 2006 CHI), and essentially,  
the feedback on quality, scope, format, etc. was pretty positive, the  
main reason why it was rejected could be summed up as "too niche an  
audience for generic HCI interests"... The chairs were skeptical the  
topic (written fairly broadly to make it appealing to the "HCI  
masses") would attract large enough numbers of conference attendees  
to justify an interesting event. :-(

Having spoken with both wksp and tutorial chairs afterward they  
haven't really see such significant differences between UI with/on  
SemWeb and other UI issues they usually address in the workshops...  
So, I guess the challenge for us = the SWUI community - is really to  
come up with a convincing case that SemWeb *really has* some  
specifics that require special attention from the UI point of view.  
And that those specifics are different from generic graph structures,  
DB schemas, logical formalisms, etc.

We (SWUI and *SWC events) probably believe there are sufficient  
differences, but I am not sure our 'optimism' is readily shared and  
adopted by other communities (be it librarians, HCI audiences, etc.)

Anyway, happy to lend my hand for what it's worth, should you/we/SWUI  
decide to give it a try in the CHI arena.... :-)

Kind regards,

M.
--
       Martin Dzbor, PhD MBA
  Knowledge Media Institute (KMi)
      The Open University, UK
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/dzbor




On 11 May 2007, at 16:43, Lloyd Rutledge wrote:

> A practical question: how many HCI attendees would submit to and/or
> attend a SWUI workshop?  It is enough?  How can we define and
> package SWUI so that it has the right overlap with CHI?
> Point: one should know that SWUI is good for and already desired by
> (or pitchable to) CHI before planning a workshop there.  I'd
> like to see it happen (and even help) but don't know the
> answer to the question above.
>
> One lead-in is the CHI work in social tagging.  This defies typical
> definitions of "semantic", but perhaps in this context CHI tagging
> can/should be considered within SWUI.  That is, "semantics" for SWUI
> means interaction that deals with annotation, collection of
> extracted features (see Hyowon's post), "non-semantic" databases and,
> of course RDF(S)/OWL.  Semantics here then has more to do with  
> aspects of
> interaction than the technology behind them.  And, of course, on
> a technological level, tags and features can be integrated with
> specifically Semantic Web technologies, and we'll probably see more
> of this.
>
> The point is we don't want people to not submit/attend because they
> think their work isn't "semanticky" enough.  This applies to SWUI@CHI
> as well as the main Semantic Web conferences.
>
> -Lloyd

Received on Friday, 11 May 2007 17:15:37 UTC