Semantic Interaction Patterns are patterns that describe typical interactions of users with semantically enriched (web) content. The overall goal is to provide best practices, tutorials and examples that help a developer (YOU) to embed semantic technoligies in your applications. This follows the idea of interaction design patterns where typical “problems” and tasks are merged into patterns to an easy-to-use mapping to their solutions.
The main goal of the EU-funded project IKS is to enable CMS developers to build applications where users can interact with knowledge at their level of knowledge. The project defined the IKS stack – a web stack architecture acting as guidance and toolkit pool – to achieve this level of interaction. Clearly, the definition of interaction patterns is a reasonable step to support the top layer of the stack and this page summarises our efforts in developing such a library. The research that is presented here is driven by the IKS project.
The listed patterns respect the create <> query <> consume <> interact life-cycle of content (and knowledge) and is reflected in the interaction and presentation layer of the IKS stack. Following the design vision document, each functionality of the stack can be described as:
- “Create”: An author/user of the system can create semantically enhanced content.
- “Query”: An author/user can query for semantically enhanced content.
- “Consume”: An author/user can consume semantically enhanced content.
- “Interact”: An author/user can interact with the content at the level of his/her domain knowledge.
Scientific definition
In general, design pattern provide proven solutions to frequent design problems in a generative and human-readable format. The special case of interaction patterns describes recurring actions a user performs when interacting with a computer to achieve a certain goal of a task. These actions are implicit if they arise from the discourse context – the previous actions of the user – and are called explicit if they are directly triggered by the user (e.g., pushing a button). In the context of IKS, we focus the interaction patterns on interaction with content and moreover the interaction with the (ontological) knowledge that corresponds to this content element.
A semantic interaction pattern consists of the following four parts that describe:
- the problem / the task
- the context situating the problem / task
- the pattern (i.e., the solution of the problem)
- use cases for the pattern
- how the pattern applies for the use cases
