I was taking another look at mSpace and I found a gem of a document: the mSpace Group Design Project Report. This is one of the best web app design docs I've come across, covering in detail the goals of the project, ui (which was identified as the most important aspect of the app), ontological design, data retrieval and expression, application flow, and user feedback (using instrumentation).

One of the goals of this project is to create a generalised system that allows for a very low cost entry into the semantic web so that the benefits can be seen and experienced by users and developers who are naive or sceptical about the semantic web and any benefits they can expect from it.
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Being able to understand the underlying semantic data, and the relationships between this data, is much more important than just presenting the information to the user.

Source: mSpace Group Design Project Report

How can I forgive myself for overlooking this pdf?