Haystack Blog

Leo Sauermann talked about Gnowsis, a “semantic desktop” built and studied several years ago.  It’s like the old Haystack system, aiming to give people a unified repository of all the information they work with on their desktop, with categories, annotation, etc.  Unlike haystack, they made sure it was bug-free and ran a user study in 2006.  The initial study was interesting, but they recently noticed that 2 people were still using the tool 2 years later.  Their paper at ISWC 08 is a field study where they videoed and interviewed those users to see how, and as importantly why, they are still using the tool.  They report on what features people are still using and what not.  For example, these users are relatively rarely creating new types (only 15 over 2 years) but are creating lots of new instances of existing types.  They also conclude that “typed relations are not needed” —just the notion of things being related was sufficient, to support people’s orienteering behavior.  Indeed there was no usage made of the typed relations.  On the other hand, typing was useful for objects.  Besides the obvious type-specific visualizations (putting times on a timeline, or locations on a map) there was value to arbitrary user-defined types, because it let the forms layout the data that needed to be shown/edited—ie, lenses in the haystack parlance.

By the way, Gnowsis is part of KDE 4.0 core, so soon they should have lots more than 2 users.