Designing user interfaces for curation technologies

Abstract

Digital content and online media have reached an unprecedented level of relevance and importance. In the context of a research and technology transfer project on Digital Curation Technologies for online content we develop a platform that provides curation services that can be integrated into concrete curation or content management systems. In this project, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) collaborates with four Berlin-based SMEs that work with and on digital content in four different sectors. The curation services comprise several semantic text and document analytics processes as well as knowledge technologies that can be applied to document collections. The key objective of this set of curation services is to support knowledge workers and digital curators in their daily work, i.e., to automate or to semi-automate processes that the human experts are normally required to do intellectually and without tool support. The goal is to help this group of information and knowledge workers to become more efficient and more effective as well as to enable them to produce high-quality content in their respective sectors. In this article we concentrate on the current state of a user interface that is currently under development at ART+COM, one of the SME partners in the project. A second, more generic, i.e., not domain-specific user interface is under development at DFKI. In this article we describe the technology platform and the two different interfaces. We also take a look at the different requirements for ART+COM’s domain-specific and DFKI’s generic user interface.