Browsing and Navigation in Semantically Rich Spaces

Semantic Web is a medium for knowledge exchange, where knowledge produced by one agent is consumed by another agent who may extend or modify it. Semantic Web also affords novel opportunities for acquiring knowledge – including approaches favoring automated selection, reuse and integration of external, just-intimegathered semantic resources. As semantic resources are no longer specifically developed for a single purpose, their re-contextualization within other web resources (e.g., web pages) is becoming a more pressing challenge. In this chapter, we look at the case when external semantic resources discovered in the web-sized corpus arere-contextualized to enhance the user experience of an arbitrary web content visited by a particular user. We first review different approaches showcasing different facets of semantic browsing and define the notion of ‘semantic browsing’ in general terms. Next, we share our experiences with Magpie, an in-house semantic web browsing framework, and illustrate new functional features such a semantically-enriched browsing tool may offer on the example of introducing additional user interaction modalities and developing a capability to work with multiple background knowledge models simultaneously. In the discussion we re-visit the defining tenets of ‘semantic browsing’ and look at how the reuse of just-in-time discovered and applied semantic resources really addresses the issue of enabling the user to re-contextualize semantic data for the purposes of text analysis, data interpretation, relationship discovery, and knowledge validation.