Laura Koesten, MSc. 

Date/Time: 6.12.2018, 15:30 

Location: D2.2.094 

Abstract 

Structured data is becoming critical in every domain and its availability on the web is increasing rapidly. Despite its abundance and variety of applications, we know very little about how people find data, understand it, and put it to use. My work aims to inform the design of data discovery tools and technologies from a user centred perspective. We want to better understand what type of information supports people in finding and selecting data relevant for their respective tasks.

I will discuss the results of a series of mixed-methods studies looking at the workflow of data practitioners, the specifics of data search on the web and the discourse that takes place around data in collaborative activities. In that context I will describe our work on user centred dataset summaries which can support the information seeking process for data.

Bio 

Laura Koesten is a Marie Curie Skłodowska fellow, doing her PhD at the Open Data Institute and at the University of Southampton in the UK. She is part of WDAqua, a European Union’s Horizon 2020 initiative to advance state of the art Question Answering. Her research interests are Human Computer Interaction, Interactive Information Retrieval with a focus on Dataset Search, Open Data and Sensemaking. In her PhD she is looking at ways to improve Human Data Interaction in IIR systems. She publishes at CHI and has a background in Human Factors.