Meaning Metaphor for Visualizing Search Results

ISBN 0-7695-2397-8While searching the Web, the user is often confronted by a great number of results, generally sorted by their rank. These results are then displayed as a succession of ordered lists. Facing the limits of this approach, we propose a prototype to explore new organizations and presentations of search results, as well as new types of interactions with the results in order to make their exploration more intuitive and efficient. The main topic of this paper is the processing of the results coming from an information retrieval system. Although the relevance depends on the result quality, the effectiveness of the result processing represents an alternative way to improve the relevance for the user. Given the current expectations, this processing is composed by an organization step and a visualization step. Then the proposed prototype organizes the results according to their meaning using a Kohonen self-organizing map, and also visualizes them in a 3D scene to increase the representation space. The 3D metaphor proposed here is a city

Évaluation des Interfaces Utilisateur d'Information

Tout processus de recherche d'information (RI) n'a de sens aux yeux des utilisateurs qu'à travers l'ultime étape qui consiste à visualiser les résultats. L'importance que prend la visualisation (ou restitution) des résultats est à l'origine des nombreuses propositions d'interfaces, qu'elles soient textuelles, 2D ou 3D. Si des évaluations de certaines de ces interfaces ont été proposées, aucune comparaison n'a réellement été réalisée dans ce contexte faute de contraintes sur ces interfaces et de critères de comparaison relatifs à la tâche de RI. Dans cet article, nous proposons d'introduire des pistes d'évaluation afin d'aboutir à un cadre expérimental permettant l'évaluation et ainsi la comparai-son des Interfaces Utilisateur d'Information

DART: the distributed agent based retrieval toolkit

The technology of search engines is evolving from indexing and classification of web resources based on keywords to more sophisticated techniques which take into account the meaning and the context of textual information and usage. Replying to query, commercial search engines face the user requests with a large amount of results, mostly useless or only partially related to the request; the subsequent refinement, operated downloading and examining as much pages as possible and simply ignoring whatever stays behind the first few pages, is left up to the user. Furthermore, architectures based on centralized indexes, allow commercial search engines to control the advertisement of online information, in contrast to P2P architectures that focus the attention on user requirements involving the end user in search engine maintenance and operation. To address such wishes, new search engines should focus on three key aspects: semantics, geo-referencing, collaboration/distribution. Semantic analysis lets to increase the results relevance. The geo-referencing of catalogued resources allows contextualisation based on user position. Collaboration distributes storage, processing, and trust on a world-wide network of nodes running on users’ computers, getting rid of bottlenecks and central points of failures. In this paper, we describe the studies, the concepts and the solutions developed in the DART project to introduce these three key features in a novel search engine architecture

Meaning Metaphor for Visualizing Search Results

ISBN 0-7695-2397-8While searching the Web, the user is often confronted by a great number of results, generally sorted by their rank. These results are then displayed as a succession of ordered lists. Facing the limits of this approach, we propose a prototype to explore new organizations and presentations of search results, as well as new types of interactions with the results in order to make their exploration more intuitive and efficient. The main topic of this paper is the processing of the results coming from an information retrieval system. Although the relevance depends on the result quality, the effectiveness of the result processing represents an alternative way to improve the relevance for the user. Given the current expectations, this processing is composed by an organization step and a visualization step. Then the proposed prototype organizes the results according to their meaning using a Kohonen self-organizing map, and also visualizes them in a 3D scene to increase the representation space. The 3D metaphor proposed here is a city