Interview_LP


 * Interviews with SemWeb (Many from Web Sci 15)**

I want to begin by tracing how you got into this field – what were your early interests, who were the main people that influenced you – as far back as you feel appropriate.

When in your career did you begin to see a need for creating a science of the Web? What were the major conversations going on at that time?

What makes you excited about the Semantic Web?

What have been the most important infrastructural contributions to the Web over the past 3 decades?

How have your approaches to your research changed since the early 1990s? Do you have new aims? Do you find it to be a more opportunistic or constraining space?

What types of knowledge forms and practice do you hope the Web will enable?

What have other disciplines [other than CS] brought to the development of the Semantic Web? How does [discipline] stand in comparison?

What are the biggest challenges facing the Semantic Web over the next decade? What needs to happen to meet these challenges?

Why the is Semantic Web called the “semantic” Web? (getting at what semantics mean to them or if it's not semantics at all)

What sort of conceptual work do your data structures/ontologies/controlled vocabularies (depending on audience) do for you? Do you think they could be designed differently or better?

What contexts is your work embedded within? Which institutions fund your work, and what are their guiding missions? Do you feel connected to that mission? Do you find that your work supports that mission?

How do disagreements in the design of Semantic Web infrastructure get worked out? (purposefully vague)

What are the biggest data and information infrastructure challenges facing the EPA over the next 5 years? Are they different than challenges over the next 20 years?
 * EPA OEI**

How has the EPA kept up with information infrastructure innovations over the past 10 years?

How do federal regulations impact EPA information infrastructure and data management?

Are data management responsibilities dispersed throughout EPA offices, or do they tend to all fall on the OEI?

How would you outline the typical data workflow of environmental data? Where are the pit stops before it gets published, who gets involved at these moments, and what policies and standards are at play?

Which data sets are the easiest to work with? Which are the hardest? What are the challenges with linking or mashing this data?

How will the Semantic Web respond to some of the data challenges that you outline?

What makes Semantic Web infrastructure difficult to implement now? What barriers do you face in making this transition? How are you preparing?

What is your relationship with the communities building and defining Semantic Web infrastructure?

What types of knowledge forms and practice do you hope the Semantic Web will enable?


 * From WebSci 15 interview with Susan Halford**

I want to begin by tracing how you got drawn into Web Science – what were your early interests, who were the main people that influenced you – as far back as you feel appropriate.

The social sciences have emerged as a key component of Web Science as characterized by Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, and other computer scientists. Have you found the work that you would like to do in Web Science to align with their conceptions? How have you made space for work that falls outside this scope?

Your ‘Digital Futures?’ paper offered provocative critiques of the Semantic Web. How did the Web Science community receive this paper?

What have been the biggest challenges to //communicating// critiques with more technologically-focused disciplines (such as computer science)? What strategies have you employed to do so?

What have been your most fruitful interdisciplinary collaborations in Web Science? What have been your most challenging?

What would Semantic Web architecture attuned to the commitments of sociology look like? Can you provide any examples of existing infrastructure?

What would it take to get social scientists involved in designing the architecture of the digital infrastructure that could best meet their needs? Is this a separate activity from the design of general Semantic Web architecture?

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">As far as I know Southampton is the only institution where students are learning how to build Semantic Web architecture, alongside social theory. How do they respond? Is the juxtaposition fruitful? Does it ever produce paralysis?