Usability Meets Instant Gratification on the Semantic Web

TL;DR

This paper introduces SHAWN, a semantic wiki prototype that combines high usability with instant gratification by enabling easy concept structuring and immediate visual feedback, encouraging adoption of Semantic Web technologies.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel semantic wiki interface that simplifies concept creation and provides immediate navigational feedback, enhancing usability and fostering ontology development.

Findings

Concept creation is simplified with a single edit box.

Immediate rendering of navigational features enhances user experience.

Ontologies emerge naturally through simple editing.

Abstract

This paper presents a semantic wiki prototype application named SHAWN [later WikSAR] that allows structuring concepts within a wiki environment. To entice the use of Semantic Web technologies applications need to offer both high usability and instant gratification. Concept creation is exceptionally easy in SHAWN since metadata as well as plain text is entered within a single edit box on each wiki page in a self-explaining fashion. The entered data is immediately used for rendering sophisticated navigational means on the wiki. By editing simple wiki pages ontologies emerge.