Habilitation Thesis University Rennes 1 Reconciling Expressivity and Usability in Information Access from File Systems to the Semantic Web S´ebastien Ferre´ Associate Professor Team LIS, IRISA, University Rennes 1
[email protected] http://www.irisa.fr/LIS/ferre/ Defended on November 6th, 2014 in front of the defense committee, composed of: Olivier Pivert Professor at Univ. Rennes 1 / president Norbert E. Fuchs Senior researcher at Univ. Zurich / referee Marianne Huchard Professor at Univ. Montpellier 2 / referee Eero Hyvonen¨ Professor at Univ. Aalto / referee Karell Bertet Associate professor (HDR) at Univ. La Rochelle / examiner Fabien Gandon Researcher (HDR) at INRIA Valbonne / examiner 2 To Sterenn, Yann, and El´eonore 3 4 Foreword Since the start of my PhD in 1999, I have worked on various problems, and produced a number of different contributions pertaining to several domains and research communities. This habilitation thesis is an opportunity for me to summarize them, and to open perspectives. However, that synthesis work is made difficult by the fact that the set of my research tracks look more like a bush than like a tree. In fact, I see the research process as an evolution process where ideas, theories, softwares, and applications compete for sur- vival, and are transformed by mutation and crossover. Some of my research tracks have gone extinct (e.g., logic functors), while others have flourished (e.g., Semantic Web). Some have appeared by mutation (e.g., guided edition from guided search), while others have merged (e.g., conceptual navigation and faceted search). At every time, there is not a single active research track, nor a \best" research track, but a population of diverse and comple- mentary research tracks.