Preface

While the original World Wide Web was mainly a Web of documents, today’s Web is
characterized by an ever-growing amount of data that is published and linked in struc-
tured formats. Data about products or services is increasingly made available for public
access by companies (e.g., Amazon A2S API, Google Maps API, etc.). Governments and
organizations publish more and more often statistics and other data on the Web, usually
with the aim to increase transparency and empowering the public to utilize this data (e.g.,
data.gov, data.gov.uk, etc.). In other attempts, structured data is extracted from Wikipedia
(e.g., DBpedia) or from multiple Web sources (e.g., Freebase). Last but not least, huge
amounts of data and metadata are created by the Web users themselves, either indirectly
(e.g., via social tagging) or in directed community efforts (e.g., Open Directory Project,
OpenStreetMap, etc.). These are just a few of the many examples where data is published
on the Web nowadays.
Several standards and best practices for the description, publication, linking, and exchange
of Web data have been developed in the past. Popular examples are W3C specifications
such as XML, SOAP, RSS, and RDF, the recommended best practices of the Linked Data
initiative, and various vocabularies that emerged from these approaches (e.g., Dublin Core,
SKOS, etc.). A similar line is taken in less formal attempts to structure data, such as
microformats or advanced tagging approaches (e.g., geotagging, hashtags, etc.).
However, the full potential of the data can only be exploited with well-designed user inter-
faces and powerful interaction techniques that allow an efficient exploration and utilization
of the data. Although some early attempts to investigate the interaction with this data have
been made in the past, there is still a large number of research questions and practical
challenges that are not yet sufficiently addressed. Reoccurring interaction problems are
differently solved and more general design recommendations and guidelines are just be-
ginning to emerge. A need for reusable design patterns and interaction techniques as well
as novel ideas, tools, and methods to present Web data to the users is clearly recognizable.
These and related issues of data-centric interactions on the Web were addressed by the
workshop. This volume contains revised versions of the peer-reviewed papers that were
presented at the workshop.
Novak and Preusse discuss the importance of providing different views on the same data to
support sensemaking and social interaction. They present an approach that aims to support
collaborative interaction and sensemaking between citizens and municipal administrations
through visual tools. Ravendran et al. discuss possibilities for online banking customiza-
tion through tag-based user interfaces. They introduce a customization framework derived
from a literature study and present a prototype that illustrates their idea for some key re-
sources of online banking. Brunk and Heim present tFacet, a tool that uses well-known
interaction concepts to facilitate faceted exploration of semantic data. It implements fea-
tures for hierarchical-faceted navigation and easy customization of the presented results
by a combination of table and tree components. Another tool that accesses Web data is
presented by Parra et al.. More! can be used on mobile devices to gather and display
information about speakers at scientific events, such as conferences or workshops. The
approach is based on the SWRC and FOAF ontologies and follows REST and Linked


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Data principles to structure and access the data. Finally, Stegemann et al. describe X3S, a
component-based approach to filter and present semantic data from the Web. They demon-
strate the applicability of their approach by an editor that is able to create, edit, and preview
X3S stylesheets, and report a comparative user study that evaluates their approach.
The workshop was co-located with the 13th IFIP TC13 Conference on Human-Computer
Interaction (INTERACT 2011) which took place in Lisbon from September 6 to 9. We
thank all authors for their contributions and the organizers of INTERACT 2011 for pro-
viding us with the opportunity to organize this event.



November 2011                                                      Paloma Díaz, Tim Hussein
                                                             Steffen Lohmann, Jürgen Ziegler




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