25-08-2017, 09:32 PM
Usability of Semantic Web for Enhancing Digital Living Experience
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ABSTRACT
The number of different types of devices on the home network is expanding rapidly. While this explosion of innovation provides compelling new devices to consumers, there are challenges ensuring compatibility among these devices and providing a comprehensive user interface that supports consumers managing their digital content across several devices. The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) has specified an architecture that enables interoperability between the various devices and allows a user to enjoy the desired content across several devices. To complement DLNA, we investigate ontological representation from semantic web technology to model the interaction between multiple home devices and to provide an enriched and more comprehensive metadata based multimedia search. This removes the user burden of searching each device individually. Development of a prototype incorporating these ideas has begun, using a well known semantic web toolkit Jena.
INTRODUCTION
The home network is rapidly increasing in complexity: every year brings an expanding array of connected consumer electronics devices, intended for deployment on the home network. While this rapid churn delivers innovative devices to the consumer, it also brings a number of problems, particularly: (i) how to achieve a consistent, powerful and engaging user experience among the expanding array of connected or related devices, and (ii) how to achieve a unified point of control for this expanding array of devices.
Towards this end, the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is defining a framework that provides basic network, service and digital media interoperability for forthcoming CE’s applications. The home, however, is a deeply heterogeneous environment, combining devices from multiple vendors, from different hardware generations, added to the home over time. In such a setting, problems arise of how to achieve compatibility while allowing evolution, and how to achieve a consistent and unified user experience. To alleviate this problem we have taken the initiative to model the interaction between multiple home devices using Semantic Web and web ontology languages (OWL/RDF).
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a "web of data" that enables machines to understand the semantics, or meaning, of information on the World Wide Web. It extends the network of hyperlinked human-readable web pages by inserting machine-readable metadata about pages and how they are related to each other, enabling automated agents to access the Web more intelligently and perform tasks on behalf of users. The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium ("W3C"), which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards. He defines the Semantic Web as "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines."
The term "Semantic Web" is often used more specifically to refer to the formats and technologies that enable it. These technologies include the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.
Ontological Representation of Multiple Device Interaction
We create a new ontology for multiple device interaction using an ontology compliance level (OWL Lite) and generate the model and RDF/XML schema in the Semantic Works interface from Altova Inc. We have defined three classes 1) ConsumerElectronics 2) MobilePhone 3) Multimedia.
We define MobilePhone as a subclass of ConsumerElectronics, which essentially states that any instance of the MobilePhone class must also be an instance of the Consumer-Electronics class. We use the Multimedia class to (i) define it as the range of a property called device:hasPlay or device:hasStore and (ii) create instances of Multimedia. We define the class MobilePhone to be the domain of the properties hasStore/hasPlay, and the class Multimedia to be the range of the properties hasStore/hasPlay. This would mean that the properties hasStore/hasPlay applies to the class MobilePhone and takes values that are instances of the class Multimedia. Properties are created at a global level and then related to different classes.
DESIGN OF DYNAMIC USER INTERFACE
Tools for querying data have traditionally been text based, although graphical interfaces have been pursued [5]. An analysis of the text based queries had revealed a construction pattern that could be satisfied with a simple visual interface. The pattern consisted of finding intersections of groups of items, where the items could be popular music and movie information, and where the items of the intersection would be composers, singers and musicians. These groups of items were often constrained by several other parameters. But the user doesn’t want to go through all these hassles to perform every request. This approach could not scale to a professional user who has to make hundreds of queries in a database. Therefore, we set out to build a Query UI that did not require the human user to become an expert of the system.
The ongoing challenge is to allow a novice user to navigate the metadata and formulate the queries without much technical intervention. RDF vocabulary metadata navigation would be the first challenge for our users. This vocabulary consists of properties about the data. For our prototype application, there are three vocabularies, movie vocabulary, music vocabulary and iTunes vocabulary. Each vocabulary has its own nuances, which must be respected while doing queries, such as movie vocabularies with categories that can be used themselves for querying.
For example, if a user enjoyed and owned music by the violinist Joshua Bell and was curious to find other music by him, today they could type “Joshua Bell” as a query in amazon.com and receive a long list of search results. Buried in the midsts of mostly CD titles is a DVD, The Red Violin, a movie in which Bell did not appear, but performed the haunting violin solos. Perhaps the user would find the buried movie item, perhaps not. The user could also do a search on Joshua Bell in IMDB.com and find The Red Violin among the search result items, but will not find any CD titles by Bell. In neither of these search examples will the user find: ∙ Music the user already owns by Bell ∙ Music the user’s friends own by Bell ∙ Joshua Bell music currently on sale by a a local commercial entity.
CONCLUSION
We present an architecture for a digital home, which includes a Virtual Media Server (VMS) and a Semantic Web Engine (SWE). We describe the basic communication between the different components in the described architecture and also present some examples where the presence of the SWE can enrich the quality of metadata-based multimedia search in the digital home.