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Objectives
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The usual web search engines are built around the simple paradigm that consists in delivering a list of documents that match a given textual query. On the Web of Data, resources are interlinked objects or concepts with multiple typed properties, meaning that data are described at a much finer grain than documents are. By adding structure and semantics to the data, these novel data models give us a tremendous opportunity to rethink how we navigate and dig into data at the scale of the World Wide Web, far beyond the queries that we typically make through simple text fields using conventional search engines. In particular, resources can be time instants and intervals that could be mapped on a timeline. With recent efforts for unifying time descriptions as URIs 1 and interlinking datasets 2, we believe that these time-related resources will offer powerful entry points to query and retrieve data that have a temporal descriptive dimension.
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Work program
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We want to investigate a novel interaction paradigm to make users able to gather knowledge from the Web of Data. Advances in HCI about multi-scale representations and gesture-based interactions for communicating with a rich vocabulary of input are especially promising for manipulating such large structured datasets. In particular, we want to design an interactive timeline on which users can perform gestures to select resources that are linked to time URIs, filter them and arrange them on screen. Starting from a multi-scale timeline, users could zoom into a time period of interest and select specific instants and/or time intervals. With an appropriate set of gestures, they could compose time intervals (intersection, union, etc.) or depict temporal behaviors (periodical, ongoing, etc.) to specify a set of temporal URIs. Thanks to the semantics associated with the data, they could also specify different ways of aggregating them to get a representation that is as meaningful as possible.
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