Bridging the gap between end-users and knowledge sources: discovery, selection and utilization

Increasingly adopted Web-based knowledge sources, such as knowledge graphs and crowdsourcing platforms, pose a great challenge in making them accessible to non-expert end-users. In particular, being unaware of the properties, structure and contents of available knowledge sources, end-users may not know which sources to use and in what manner. In this talk I will present several directions towards bridging this gap. First, we assist users in identifying adequate knowledge sources, via a declarative framework that supports "soft" constraints reflecting, e.g., the relevance of the knowledge source to a given topic or query and diversification considerations. We accompany the proposed sources with intuitive explanations, which enable the user to provide further feedback and refine the source selection. Next, we adopt an exploratory approach allowing the user to discover relevant contents within knowledge sources, based on information-theoretic principles and via an interactive process.