User-centered design and evaluation of interface enhancements to the semantic mediawiki bibtex

Semantic wikis are a lightweight form of semantic technol-ogy that can enable more effective and active use of systems developed within the already popular wiki paradigm. But the goal of making the use and authoring of semantic wikis easy and attractive for a broad range of users raises several in-teraction design challenges: How can users unfamiliar with semantic technologies be helped and motivated to specify the many necessary typed links in a way that results in a useful web of annotations? And how can visitors of the resulting pages be helped to make maximal use of the added semantic information? With this case study, we discuss work con-ducted since the beginning of 2007 on the user-centered de-sign and testing of interface enhancements for the Semantic MediaWiki developed at AIFB, focusing on their application to scientific pages adopted from Wikipedia. We discuss, with reference to specific interface examples, how usability chal-lenges were addressed in the initial conceptualization of the interface enhancements, how user requirements were antic-ipated, and how the interface enhancements were iteratively tested and refined. We then describe an intermediate evalu-ation involving 42 participants and sketch further work cur-rently in progress. We conclude with comments on some general lessons learned from this work concerning the appli-cation of user-centered design in the semantic web area.