Persona Modeling Process: from
Microdata-based Templates to
Specific Web Ontologies
Stefan Negru, Sabin Buraga
FACULTY OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, AL. I . CUZA UNIVERSITY OF IASI, ROMANIA
4th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
KEOD 2012 – Barcelona, Spain
MOTIVATION
“The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but
an extension of the current one, in which
information is given well-defined meaning,
better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. “ -- Tim Berners-Lee
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
AGENDA
What are Personas Personas Methodology
Personas Template
Developed Microdata Schemas
Microdata &/vs. RDFa
Personas Ontology
In Practice
Future Work and Conclusions
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
WHAT ARE PERSONAS ?
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
WHAT ARE PERSONAS GOOD FOR ?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10ch/1907964320/
PERSONAS METHODOLOGY
A persona is the archetype of the ideal group of
users for a certain product/application.
It is used to collect user specific information
(interests, goals, frustrations, etc.).
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
PERSONAS METHODOLOGY
• Often done on paper
• Based on user interviews
• Containing fictional information
• Difficult to validate the information collected
against real users
• Difficult to select the right users, based on
these personas for the usability tests
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
PERSONAS METHODOLOGY
What do we need to make it better ?
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
PERSONAS REVIEWED…
• Often done on paper
• Based on user interviews
• Containing fictional information
• Difficult to validate the information collected
against real users
• Difficult to select the right users, based on
these personas for the usability tests
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
PERSONAS TEMPLATE
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
1. Type and Background Information
2. Main Details
4. Other Details
3. Scenarios
ANOTHER (HTML5) TEMPLATE ?
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012 http://www.flickr.com/photos/bioxid/4293394187/
Microdata & RDFa Microdata
• “mechanism allows machine-readable data to be embedded
in HTML documents in an easy-to-write manner, with an
unambiguous parsing model.”
http://www.w3.org/TR/microdata/
• was initially designed as a simple subset of RDFa and
Microformats, primarily focusing on the core features of RDFa.
RDFa Lite
• “RDFa Lite is a minimal subset of RDFa, consisting of a few
attributes that may be used to express machine-readable data
in Web documents like HTML, SVG, and XML.”
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-lite/
• contains all of the simplicity of Microdata coupled with the
extensibility of and compatibility with RDFa.
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
Microdata vs. RDFa
Microdata RDFa 1.1 Lite*
w3c working draft, part of HTML5 w3c standard as June 2012
Similar markup
Anyone can define their own custom vocabularies
Not supported datatypes of literals
Not supported XML literals.
Not supported vocab
Not supported prefix
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
* RDFa 1.0 was XHTML specific.
Microdata & RDFa SOLUTIONS Some existing solutions to annotation the HTML5 template:
Microdata schemas:
http://schema.org/Person
RDFa syntax using some existing vocabularies:
http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/
http://rdfs.org/sioc/spec/
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
INCOMPLETE INFORMATION … [ a schema:Person;
schema:givenName "Jane"@en-us;
schema:familyName "Doe"@en-us;
schema:gender "Female"@en-us;
schema:birthDate "1989-05-11"^^xsd:date;
schema:image <student.jpg>;
schema:location [ a schema:Place;
schema:name "City,Country"@en-us ];
schema:worksFor [ a schema:Organization;
schema:jobTitle “Graduate Student"@en-us;
schema:name "Univ. City,Country"@en-us ];
schema:alumniOf [ a schema:EducationalOrganization
schema:name "Univ. City,Country"@en-us ] ]
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
HOW TO IMPROVE IT ?
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmmmmrob/2547945441/
DEVELOPED MICRODATA SCHEMAS
1. Persona - An archetype representing a fictional person or a
group of persons.
2. Scenario - a collage of events or series of actions and events,
which takes place under certain conditions.
3. Context - The circumstances that form the setting for an event or
a scenario.
4. Disability - Categories of physical or mental disabilities.
5. Other Schemas developed: UsabilityTesting, Task.
These types are developed as extensions to schema.org.
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
DEVELOPED MICRODATA SCHEMAS
Other existing types have been reused: Person,
Place, Event, Product, ImageObject etc.
Other types might need to be defined: Emotion,
Personality, SoftwareApplication etc.
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
PERSONA - MICRODATA SCHEMA DEVELOPED
Property Expected Type
personaType Text
minHeight, maxHeight, minWeight, maxWeight, minBustSize, maxBustSize,
minWaistSize, maxWaistSize, minFeetSize, maxFeetSize
Float
experienceGoal, endGoal,lifeGoal, businessGoal, technicalGoal,
experienceGoal
Text
experienceLevel, technicalLevel Text
disability Disability or Text
myerBriggs Personality or Text
affectiveState Emotion or Text
frustrationPOint Text
userRole Text
scenario Scenario or URL
context Context
topicInterest Thing
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
SCENARIO - MICRODATA SCHEMA DEVELOPED
Property Expected Type
product Product or Application
scenarioName Text
userTask Text (or Task)
productTask Text (or Task)
interactionMedium (Touch, Gestural, Mouse+keyboard) Text
context Context
participant Person
usabilityTest (a scenario might belong to an usability test) Text (or UsabilityTest)
evaluatedElements (elements of the interface) Text
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
Context - MICRODATA SCHEMA DEVELOPED
Property Expected Type
contextType Text
location Place or PostalAddress
event Event
sensorData Text
geo GeoCoordinates or
GeoShape
photos Photograph or ImageObject
reviews Review
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
USING THE MICRODATA SCHEMAS
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
schema:personaType "Primary"@en-us;
schema:mainPoint [ a rdf:Bag;
rdf:_1 "Experience with Android OS;" @en-us;
rdf:_2 "connected socially to most of her colleagues and some teachers. "@en-us.];
schema:technicalLevel "Medium"@en-us;
schema:businessGoal "increase knowledge"@en-us;
schema:experienceGoal "getting a proper education“ @en-us;
schema:frustrationPoint [ a rdf:Bag;
rdf:_1 "hard to use"@en-us,
rdf:_2 "no feedback provided"@en-us. ];
schema:lifeGoal "be productive"@en-us;
schema:scenario [ a <http://schema.org/Scenario>;
schema:description "she will check grades and progress online"@en-us ] ]
More details and examples are provided in our paper.
HOW TO IMPROVE IT ? – PART 2
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmmmmrob/2547945441/
PERSONAS ONTOLOGY OVERVIEW
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
PersonasOnto IN DETAIL Class Name Subclasses
AffectiveState Emotion, Feeling, Mood
Context Intangible, Tangible, Place, Time
Disability VisualImpairment, HearingImpairment, GustatoryImpairment,
IntellectualImpairment, MentalEmotionalDisorder, SomatosensoryImpairment,
DevelopmentDisability
Goals BusinessGoals, EndGoals, ExperienceGoals, LifeGoals, TechnicalGoals
Organization Corporation, EducationalOrganization, GovermentOrganization, Group,
MediumBusiness, NGO, SmallBusiness, SportsTeam
Person Participant, Persona*
Personality --
Resource Document, Image, Product
Scenario --
Task InteractiveTask, NonInteractiveTask
UsabilityTest --
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
*it can be viewed as a social role or character of a person.
IN PRACTICE …
• Using the obtained information from the personas document in
order to replicate the desired context
• The context has a direct impact on the user performance on
certain tasks
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
FUTURE WORK
• Automate the process of preparing the personas document
• Automatically validate persona information against real user
information
• Automatically select human (based on social network profile)
for user testing/usability testing
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
CONCLUSIONS
• We developed
• an HTML5 template for Personas
• several Microdata Schemas
• PersonasOnto ontology
• These vocabularies open new possibilities regarding:
• automatically validation and generation of personas
• linking the data extracted with other data in the spirit of
Linked Data initiative
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
RESOURCES Personas Template:
• http://blankdots.com/open/personas/
Proposed Personas and Usability Testing extensions to schema.org
• http://blankdots.com/open/schema/
PersonasOnto
• http://blankdots.com/open/personasonto.owl
PersonasOnto documentation using LODE service
• http://tinyurl.com/personasonto
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012
THANK YOU
Stefan Negru
• http://blankdots.com
Faculty of Computer Science UAIC Iasi, Romania KEOD 2012