Static, dynamic and active interaction structures in the web: providing semantic annotations in the virtual knowledge space

• Authors: Sabrina Geissler;Thorsten Hampel
• Venue: MIS '05 Proceedings of the 2005 symposia on Metainformatics
• Year: 2005

The aim of the article is to enhance a cooperative working and learning environment, a so-called virtual knowledge space, with additional semantic annotations. To do so, we first consider two prominent approaches to illustrate how machine processable data for web search can be obtained: either by explicit semantic mark-up (as practiced in the Semantic Web) or by cooperative filtering of user activities. As both can be described with the help of an interaction model, the first approach leads to static, the second to dynamic interaction structures. As a third alternative, we show how machine processable annotations can be created during co-operative activities. We refer to this innovative approach as active semantic structuring of the web. These annotations are integrated into virtual knowledge spaces and theoretically substantiated by the media functions approach. To illustrate the practical relevance of this approach, two possible examples of application will be touched, metadata and ontologies.