Search in the eye of the beholder: using the personal social dataset and ontology-guided input to improve web search efficiency

Proceedings of: Latin American Web Conference 2007 (LA-WEB 2007), 31 October-2 November 2007, Santiago (Chile)Among the challenges of searching the vast information source the Web has become, improving Web search efficiency by different strategies using semantics and the user generated data from Web 2.0 applications remains a promising and interesting approach. In this paper, we present the Personal Social Dataset and Ontology-guided Input strategies and couple them together, providing a proof of concept implementation.Publicad

Improving Exploratory Search Interfaces: Adding Value or Information Overload?

One method for supporting more exploratory forms of search has been to include a compound of new interface features, such as facets, previews, collection points, synchronous communication, and note-taking spaces, within a single search interface. One side effect, however, is that some compounds can be confusing, rather than supportive during search. Faceted browsing, for example, conveys domain terminology and supports rich interaction, but can potentially present an abundance of information. In this paper we focus on the faceted example and conclude with our position that Cognitive Load Theory can be used to estimate and thus manage the potential complexities of adding new features to search interfaces

When a Librarian's Not There to Ask: Creating an Information Resource Advisory Tool

It is 2am. A professor wakes up with a new direction for her research; she must immediately learn about bioethics. In a dorm a student is finally ready to begin a paper on Cuba. Where do they turn? The library web site presents them with a bewildering array of resources and no librarian on hand to serve as intermediary. How can librarians facilitate research in their absence? What interfaces can be designed to educate users in their search? What metadata is needed to enable accurate retrieval? What is the librarian’s role in the increasingly indirectly-mediated information-seeking environment? Can the reference interview be effectively translated into a search interface? This paper describes a step towards resolving these issues by creating an on-line tool to assist users in selecting the database(s) most germane to their research needs

Automatic organisation of retrieved images into a hierarchy

Image retrieval is of growing interest to both search engines and academic researchers with increased focus on both content-based and caption-based approaches. Image search, however, is different from document retrieval: users often search a broader set of retrieved images than they would examine returned web pages in a search engine. In this paper, we focus on a concept hierarchy generation approach developed by Sanderson and Croft in 1999, which was used to organise retrieved images in a hierarchy automatically generated from image captions. Thirty participants were recruited for the study. Each of them conducted two different kinds of searching tasks within the system. Results indicated that the user retrieval performance in both interfaces of system is similar. However, the majority of users preferred to use the concept hierarchy to complete their searching tasks and they were satisfied with using the hierarchical menu to organize retrieved results, because the menu appeared to provide a useful summary to help users look through the image results

Automatically organising images using concept hierarchies

In this paper we discuss the use of concept hierarchies, an approach to automatically organize a set of documents based upon a set of concepts derived from the documents themselves for image retrieval. Co-occurrence between terms associated with image captions and a statistical relation called subsumption are used to generate term clusters which are organized hierarchically. Previously, the approach has been studied for document retrieval and results have shown that automatically generating hierarchies can help users with their search task. In this paper we present an implementation of concept hierarchies for image retrieval, together with preliminary ad-hoc evaluation. Although our approach requires more investigation, initial results from a prototype system are promising and would appear to provide a useful summary of the search results

Image annotation with Photocopain

Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to expend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are required to organise their collections so that they can make best use of them. This paper describes the Photocopain system, a semi-automatic image annotation system which combines information about the context in which a photograph was captured with information from other readily available sources in order to generate outline annotations for that photograph that the user may further extend or amend

Documenting some Uses of the Isidore Platform

The availability of millions of digital resources, and of the means for processing, analysing, signalling, and exposing them, should make it possible to facilitate the emergence of new research objects and new questions. After a brief description of Isidore, this paper proposes first results in observing the Isidore platform because it presents all the basic materials a researcher needs: publications, blogs, websites and conference calendars. Then we discuss how facets proposed by Isidore are currently being used and finally we propose some issues which are being studie

Spatially organized visualization of image query results

Gianluigi Ciocca, Claudio Cusano, Simone Santini, Raimondo Schettini, "Spatially organized visualization of image query results", Proceedings of SPIE 7881, Multimedia on Mobile Devices 2011; and Multimedia Content Access: Algorithms and Systems V. Ed. David Akopian, Reiner Creutzburg, Cees G. M. Snoek, Nicu Sebe, Lyndon Kennedy, SPIE (2011). Copyright 2011 Society of Photo‑Optical Instrumentation Engineers. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited.In this work we present a system which visualizes the results obtained from image search engines in such a way that users can conveniently browse the retrieved images. The way in which search results are presented allows the user to grasp the composition of the set of images "at a glance". To do so, images are grouped and positioned according to their distribution in a prosemantic feature space which encodes information about their content at an abstraction level that can be placed between visual and semantic information. The compactness of the feature space allows a fast analysis of the image distribution so that all the computation can be performed in real time

Does Design Contribute to Ease of Use: An Exploratory Study of Web Facets in The Result Pages of Two Search Engines

An exploratory study was conduced to examine the design aspects of Web facets found in the search result pages of two search engines: Exalead and Excite. The goal of the study was to determine if Web facet design could contribute to perceived ease of use. This study builds upon findings from an earlier study (Milonas, 2010) in which the results indicated that users perceived the Web facets evident in the search result pages of the Exalead search engine easier to use than those found in Excite. The researcher surmised that the design of these Web facets might have contributed to the difference in perceived ease of use. The relationship between design and user perception in determining the ease of use of Web facets within these two search engines is explored. In the first component of the study, an expert inspection of the various design aspects of the search result pages of Exalead and Excite was conducted.  In the second part of the study, five participants conducted an experiment using the Web facets found in the search result pages of the two search engines. Findings of both the expert inspection and the usability evaluation showed that there does not seem to be a significant difference in the design of Web facets within the two search engines. The findings seem to indicate that design of Web facets is not a contributory factor in terms of Web facet ease of use