Towards user assistance for documents via interactional semantic technology

Abstract

As documents become disseminated widely, establishing the context for interpretation becomes difficult. We argue that high-impact documents require embedded user assistance facilities for their readers (not authors) to cope with their semantic complexity. We suggest to illustrate such documents and their players with a semiformal background ontology, an interpretation mapping between domain concepts and semantic objects, and to enable with this setup semantic interaction. We showcase the feasibility and interactional potential of user assistance for documents based on interactional semantic technology with an exemplary implementation for a high-impact Excel spreadsheet. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.