Section: New Results

Analyzing and Modeling Users, Communities and their Interactions in a Social Semantic Web Context

Analyzing and Modeling the Sharing and Articulation of Representations

Participants : Alain Giboin, Gessica Puri.

Comparing and Bridging Models of Representation Sharing Processes

Context: Follow-up to the RefCom joint research action of the GDR CNRS Psycho-Ergo, in collaboration with Pascal Salembier (UTT, France).

We continued our work on comparing and bridging models of representation sharing processes (see Edelweiss activity report 2011) in order to achieve mutual intelligibility between researchers working on such models. We extended at the European level the test and application of the grid we elaborated for collaboratively comparing and bridging the conceptualizations [86] , [65] .

Methods and tools for articulating developers, domain experts, users and usage analysts' representations

Reconciling informal and formal representations through the ECCO collaborative ontology editor

Context: Follow-up to the ANR project e-WOK HUB, in collaboration with Priscille Durville (a former Inria expert engineer, currently engineer at Xerox), Sandrine Grataloup and Olivier Morel (BRGM), Michel Perrin (ENSMP)

In a new publication [81] , we reported the method we designed and proposed to geologists and knowledge engineers to help them jointly define domain ontologies from textual documents. The method is instrumented through a collaborative ontology editor (ECCO) which integrates two tools for automatic analysis of natural language. ECCO allows articulating the informal representations formulated by geologists in natural language and the knowledge engineers’ fully formalized ontology-based representations that can be processed automatically by a semantic search engine like Corese.

Frameworks and Toolsets

Context 1: Capitalizing methods and tools developed in the Wimmics (formerly Edelweiss) team

We started to integrate into a general framework the methods and tools developed in the Wimmics (formerly Edelweiss) team to help developers, domain experts, users and usage analysts reconcile their views in order to design user-adapted social semantic applications. A preliminary presentation of the framework was given in the interdisciplinary seminar mentioned in Section "Invited Talks".

Context 2: PhD thesis of Gessica Puri and Wimmics projects related to visualization and manipulation of links.

We are currently developing a "design thinking" toolset (including a framework) for helping developers think in terms of a user’s point of view when they design and evaluate link visualization and manipulation applications such as graph visualization applications [90] . A first version of the toolset is being validated by developers of the team.

Scenario Modeling and User Modeling for system design and evaluation

Participants : Alain Giboin, Gessica Puri.

In the context of different design projects, we applied, adapted or renewed some of our scenario and user modeling methods.

Context 1: ISICIL project. In collaboration with Rubiela Silva (UNS & Ademe), Claire Prendleloup (Ademe), Mylène Leitzelman (Telecom ParisTech)

In order to evaluate the usefulness and usability of the ISICIL platform (see 6.2 ) for one of the communities of potential users of the platform (the French Environment and Energy Management Agency), we adapted in particular: (a) a technique for modeling collectives and their related scenarios to prepare testing situations as close as possible to real situations met by the potential users; and (b) an existing set of collective heuristics, i.e., heuristics formerly designed to evaluate groupware; see, e.g. [93] . We also proposed the technique of Online collaborative sessions supported by the ISICIL communication functionalities (chat and comments) as a writing-based version of the think out loud protocol. These techniques are partly described in [91] , [92] .

Context 2: PAL project, in collaboration with David Daney (Coprin), Rémi Barraquand (Prima), Nadine Mandran (Pôle d’Ingénierie Multidisciplinaire du Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble)

In this work we applied and adapted techniques for articulating system-oriented scenarios (coming from robotics and computer vision specialists) and user-oriented scenarios. These scenarios were intended to guide the design of useful and usable services improving the autonomy and quality of life for elderly and fragile persons. An output of this work has been the organization of workshop where PAL researchers were invited to specify the scenarios motivating the development of their services.

Context 3: Projects Socio-cultural encyclopedia of Senegalese communities and Global Warming Platform – Papa Fary Diallo (Wimmics PhD student), Fatou Kamara and Moussa Lo (Université Gaston-Berger, Saint-Louis, Sénégal)

We started to apply techniques for modeling groups of users and their related scenarios to the design of social semantic applications aimed at (a) communities wanting to adapt these applications to their own culture, and (b) at communities including persons from different specialties (geographers, mathematicians) and laypersons which want to collaborate on global warming issues.

Context 4: Discovery Hub project, PhD thesis of Nicolas Marie, in collaboration with Florentin Rodio (Alcatel Lucent); also related to the PhD thesis of Gessica Puri.

In order to perform a user-oriented evaluation of the Discovery Hub recommender system (see 6.13 and [100] ), we used techniques allowing to define more realistic scenarios of interaction with the recommender system from the user's point of view, and to analyze users' cognitive processes when they interact with the system (e.g., when they select recommended items or when they assess the quality of a recommendation with and without explanations).

Exploring eye-tracking techniques for evaluating information organization aspects in Web applications

Participants : Valériane Dusaucy, Alain Giboin.

Context: collaboration with Valériane Dusaucy (PhD student, University of Aix-Marseille & CIFRE Société Ausy) and Franck Ferront (ergonome, Société Ausy)

We designed an experiment to explore the potentiality of eye-tracking techniques for evaluating information organization aspects in Web applications from a user’s point of view, and to compare it to other evaluation techniques such as heuristic evaluation. The experiment, which takes place in the Ubiquarium of the I3S Laboratory, is in progress.