WYSIWYM – Integrated visualization, exploration and authoring of semantically enriched un-structured content

The Semantic Web and Linked Data gained traction in the last years. However, the majority of information still is contained in unstructured documents. This can also not be expected to change, since text, images and videos are the natural way how humans interact with information. Semantic structuring on the other hand enables the (semi-)automatic integration, repurposing, rearrangement of information. NLP technologies and formalisms for the integrated representation of unstructured and semantic content (such as RDFa and Microdata) aim at bridging this semantic gap. However, in order for humans to truly benefit from this integration, we need ways to author, visualize and explore unstructured and semantically enriched content in an integrated manner. In this paper, we present the WYSIWYM (What You See is What You Mean) concept, which addresses this issue and formalizes the binding between semantic representation models and UI elements for authoring, visualizing and exploration. With RDFaCE, Pharmer and conTEXT we present and evaluate three complementary showcases implementing the WYSIWYM concept for different application domains