Talking about Data: Sharing Richly Structured Information through Blogs and Wikis

Abstract

Several projects have brought rich data semantics to collaborative wikis, but blogging platforms remain primarily limited to text. As blogs comprise a significant portion of the web’s content, engagement of the blogging community is crucial to the development of the semantic web. We provide a study of blog content to show a latent need for better data publishing and visualization support in blogging software. We then present DataPress, an extension to the WordPress blogging platform that enables users to publish, share, aggregate, and visualize structured information using the same workflow that they already apply to text-based content. In particular, we aim to preserve those attributes that make blogs such a successful publication medium: one-click access to the information, one-click publishing of it, natural authoring interfaces, and easy copy and paste of information (and visualizations) from other sources. We reflect on how our designs make progress toward these goals with a study of how users who installed DataPress made use of various features.