Accessing the Web of Data through embodied virtual characters

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Cimiano, Philipp^; | Kopp, Stefan

Affiliations: Semantic Computing Group, Cognitive Interaction Technology Excellence Center (CITEC), Bielefeld University, Germany | Sociable Agents Group, Cognitive Interaction Technology Excellence Center (CITEC), Bielefeld University, Germany. E-mail: kopp@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de

Note: [] Corresponding author. E-mail: cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de.

Abstract: The amount of data published on the Semantic Web has witnessed a tremendous growth in the last years to which the Linked Open Data (LOD) project has contributed significantly. While the Semantic Web was originally conceived of as an extension to the Web by addition of machine-readable data allowing automatic processing by machines, the question how humans can benefit from all the data published on the Web is becoming an important one. In the light of this question it seems crucial to make accessing the data on the Web as easy and intuitive as possible by adapting to the cognitive and information processing capabilities of humans. In this short position paper, we argue that one interesting and promising approach in this direction is to allow people to access semantic data on the Web through multimodal interaction with embodied virtual characters.

Keywords: Semantic web, interaction, multimodal access, virtual characters

DOI: 10.3233/SW-2010-0008

Journal: Semantic Web, vol. 1, no. 1-2, pp. 83-88, 2010