C MN: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide1-0.html is the first slide her_uvic@mac.com: susan is introducing the panel on accessibilty her_uvic@mac.com: there were two parts to this pane - examining many aspects of the digital divides. her_uvic@mac.com: we look at accessibility to and of ICTs. her_uvic@mac.com: the first panel featured Jutta and Laurie (from the ATRC) and Andrew Clement (also from the UNiversity of Toronto). her_uvic@mac.com: The panel is examining what it means to ensure accessibility of the online world. her_uvic@mac.com: many discussions about digital divides overlooks issues of access for people with disabilities. the confrerence theme is Broadening the Band... her_uvic@mac.com: nice photo - and over to you C MN: Hi, I am going to talk about what the semantic web can do for accessibility... C MN: from the perspective of someone working on the semantic web (but who has also worked in accessibility) C MN: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide2-0.html C MN: in case people don't know much about the semantic web, I have a one slide summmary C MN: (there are specifications - the Resource Description Framework to make all this work...) C MN: it's a major activity at W3C, and was part of the original design of the Web. C MN: The fundamental piece is the line at the top - where each thing is really something on the Web (i.e. something with a URI (or URL) C MN: The goal is to make the Web easier to process with a computer, rather than having to read everything and work out which link to follow. C MN: A little like making the Web work as a giant database, but it is free-form - you can expand it as you go, like we do with the Web of documents, pictures and so on. C MN: So what does it do... http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide3-0.html C MN: These are some things that would help accessibility - examples I will explore in the next 15 minutes... C MN: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide4-0.html C MN: For some people, their disability affects their ability to read. C MN: Most of us can approximate this by reading Einstein's theory of relativity - if that's too easy, read the original german... C MN: (if that's too easy wait for the next example C MN: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide5-0.html C MN: We can use RDF (the language of the semantic web, an XML language, like lots of things on teh Web) C MN: to make a numer of statements (of the form something has a relationship to something) about this piece of writing. C MN: With these statements we can find that there are simpler ways to learn about Relativity... C MN: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide6-0.html shows this information as I see it in an RDF authoring tool. C MN: (in the tool I edit by putting in more blobs and arrows, and saying what they are.Then it produces the RDF code. It is called RDF Author, but there are others available that work in different ways) C MN: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide7-0 C MN: Some things that make this work: C MN: there are lots of vocabularies defined for important relationships - some are produced by large standards efforts like Dublin Core, some are produced by people because they need to describe something. C MN: A related example: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide8-0.html C MN: we have seen how to make statements about a work - imagine that we are talking instead about a picture, to someone who can't see it. C MN: (like I can't see the audience here) her_uvic@mac.com: that's funny C MN: In practice people will make different types of description for different purposes C MN: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide9-0.html RDF allows us to describe the relationship between the different kinds of description as well. C MN: A neat corollary of having this information is that people can also find pictures from the descriptions, and use them to put together images they cannot see. C MN: (this works better for some types of image than others - but a lot of things drawn at work are not really candidates for the Tate Modern - C MN: just meant to illustrate some idea because it is easier than reading through lists of items...) C MN: Integrating this into authoring tools makes it easier for ordinary people to improve accessibility by minimising the amount of work they have to do... C MN: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide10-0.html In different situations different people will want different versions of the same information C MN: this might be because of disability - there are some important use cases there, and a blind person can't choose to look at the pictures - but C MN: it might just be because they are in France behind an impenetrable firewall, or on the phone, or watching the World Cup. C MN: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide11-0.html some specifications (vocabularies) that get put together to find the version of the theory of relativity that meets my needs at this particular moment. C MN: We need to describe what I want, find a document that is the right "work", find a version that meets some requirements, and be able to describe what those requirements are. C MN: 5 specifications from 3 different organisations are readily merged together to do the overall job C MN: and lead me to something useful... C MN: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide12-0.html C MN: A couple of other interesting use cases: C MN: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide13-0.html C MN: Finding actual people. C MN: Most of the specifications used in this are made by people on the weekend, as are most of the tools. C MN: Based on a common framework of a semantic web. C MN: Lots of the information can be drawn from people's homepages, contact databases, etc. C MN: But the value is in merging it with new information. C MN: This was helpful for me recently: I had a legal problem in italy, and needed to find lawyers, experts in medieval history and in the laws on presenting stuff for educational purposes, C MN: and make sure that the people, who spoke a a collection of English, italian and french, saw the documents they needed, in teh versions they could understand... C MN: (It works. All the charges were thrown out as having no substance - fortunately, because they were in fact quite serious - several years of jail in Italy was on offer) C MN: And this was a simple extension of these weekend projects. her_uvic@mac.com: no world cup there I bet C MN: well, only matches Italy won I imagine. C MN: One final example: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide14-0.html C MN: This is a real session in a real chatroom with me and a piece of software this evening C MN: If you follow the link at the bottom ("semantic Web Programs...") you can see what was put onto the Web - the program collects the key pieces of discussion and archives them C MN: Which allows for real time augmentation of the chat, and also preserves the information for people with short memory (or who get disconnected) C MN: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1018-aoir/slide15-0.html C MN: I hope that has illustrated a little of what is possible, and a little of how the semantic web can enhance the web we have spent ten years developing. C MN: (do we have any questions / time for them?) her_uvic@mac.com: yes we have time... C MN: my email address is the link on every page of the slides - I try to answer things there too, although usually by referring people to a wider, publicly archived forum. her_uvic@mac.com: query: please advise on visualization strategies for mapping semantic relationships. C MN: (The "bye - thanks again" link is where I am right now...) C MN: you mean how to see a collection of relationships, or how to see the mappings between colections of relationships? her_uvic@mac.com: the second - how to see mapping between collections... C MN: In any event, there are some important things. it turns out that people can't cope with too many things in one diagram, so you need ways of collapsing out the stuff that isn't immmediately relevant. her_uvic@mac.com: can you provide references or web links for research programs in this area? C MN: so you are looking at something like how to understand that you say zoo and I say menagerie, and the meanings overlap. C MN: I can't provide good references for visualisation research in this area, but most of them would be from traditional graphic communication C MN: augmented with the ability to do dynamic presentation. C MN: There is certainly work in this area in the semantic web - tools such as IsaViz with its Graphic Style Sheets, and GraphViz which represents such information. C MN: People who studied sets, in maths (I did it in early high school, and at a simplistic level in lower grade school as a prelude to multiplication) will recall ways of showing that some things are in one or other set, and some are in a couple at a time. C MN: and that the diagram gets very complicted very quickly. C MN: Fortunately on the Web we have dynamic formats like SVG, so you can concentrate on the thing immediately at hand... her_uvic@mac.com: query: is PICS a good role model for metadata? C MN: A good role model... Hmmm. C MN: In the sense of being there before it is. C MN: PICS developed into RDF - the language that W3C now uses for the semantic Web. C MN: PICS (and in another way Dublin Core) demonstrate the problem with "flat" models. C MN: with RDF you can build up layers of complexity as you realise the complexity of the problems you deal with. C MN: It is all very well to call a page of pictures and text a text document (as Dublin Core does) but for accessibility that isn't enough information. her_uvic@mac.com: we will need to move along shortly... C MN: Similarly PICS is really just name-value pairs. It is very hard to describe the relations between relationships in PICS. C MN: But it did have the feature of demonstrating that allowing anyone to make the statements is an important step forwards. C MN: (The polite way to applaud a deaf person is wave your hands in the air, apparently --thanks to Robert Luke for interpreting to the audience, and Steve from Apple for logistics support.