Eureka! Institutional Repository

The Semantic Web is a space with structured data, whose structure captures their interconnections, their relations. Through the use of the ontologies and the semantic annotation, the machines can become aware of the meaning of these structured, interconnected data. When the semantic web is directly accessed by the humans instead, the user interface, has to integrate with the semantic web's formalism, so that the humans are enabled to interpret the meaning of the structure of the data. The goal of this thesis is to create a bibliographic review for the issues related to the user interfaces, with respect to their application in the access of the semantic web. At frst is conducted a feld research in the world wide web, in order to discover and record semantic web's user interfaces. Then a study of related literature is performed and in the fndings are identifed and analysed those distinctive characteristics, that a user interface needs to support, with respect to its application in the access of the semantic web. Based on this analysis of the literature, a model is devised, to bring together the individual distinctive characteristics and the model's formalism is applied to the fndings of the feld research. Then follows a comparative study and evaluation of how the discovered user interfaces support the distinctive characteristics. In the closing, some standing out cases are presented further and conclusions are drawn