Conversational Exploratory Search via Interactive Storytelling

Conversational interfaces are likely to become more efficient, intuitive and engaging way for human-computer interaction than today's text or touch-based interfaces. Current research efforts concerning conversational interfaces focus primarily on question answering functionality, thereby neglecting support for search activities beyond targeted information lookup. Users engage in exploratory search when they are unfamiliar with the domain of their goal, unsure about the ways to achieve their goals, or unsure about their goals in the first place. Exploratory search is often supported by approaches from information visualization. However, such approaches cannot be directly translated to the setting of conversational search. In this paper we investigate the affordances of interactive storytelling as a tool to enable exploratory search within the framework of a conversational interface. Interactive storytelling provides a way to navigate a document collection in the pace and order a user prefers. In our vision, interactive storytelling is to be coupled with a dialogue-based system that provides verbal explanations and responsive design. We discuss challenges and sketch the research agenda required to put this vision into life.Comment: Accepted at ICTIR'17 Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI 2017

Supporting user-oriented analysis for multi-view domain-specific visual languages

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Information and Software Technology. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2008 Elsevier B.V.The integration of usable and flexible analysis support in modelling environments is a key success factor in Model-Driven Development. In this paradigm, models are the core asset from which code is automatically generated, and thus ensuring model correctness is a fundamental quality control activity. For this purpose, a common approach is to transform the system models into formal semantic domains for verification. However, if the analysis results are not shown in a proper way to the end-user (e.g. in terms of the original language) they may become useless. In this paper we present a novel DSVL called BaVeL that facilitates the flexible annotation of verification results obtained in semantic domains to different formats, including the context of the original language. BaVeL is used in combination with a consistency framework, providing support for all steps in a verification process: acquisition of additional input data, transformation of the system models into semantic domains, verification, and flexible annotation of analysis results. The approach has been validated analytically by the cognitive dimensions framework, and empirically by its implementation and application to several DSVLs. Here we present a case study of a notation in the area of Digital Libraries, where the analysis is performed by transformations into Petri nets and a process algebra.Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and MODUWEB

explorase: Multivariate Exploratory Analysis and Visualization for Systems Biology

The datasets being produced by high-throughput biological experiments, such as microarrays, have forced biologists to turn to sophisticated statistical analysis and visualization tools in order to understand their data. We address the particular need for an open-source exploratory data analysis tool that applies numerical methods in coordination with interactive graphics to the analysis of experimental data. The software package, known as explorase, provides a graphical user interface (GUI) on top of the R platform for statistical computing and the GGobi software for multivariate interactive graphics. The GUI is designed for use by biologists, many of whom are unfamiliar with the R language. It displays metadata about experimental design and biological entities in tables that are sortable and filterable. There are menu shortcuts to the analysis methods implemented in R, including graphical interfaces to linear modeling tools. The GUI is linked to data plots in GGobi through a brush tool that simultaneously colors rows in the entity information table and points in the GGobi plots.

Prototype Packages for Managing and Animating Longitudinal Network Data: dynamicnetwork and rSoNIA

Work with longitudinal network survey data and the dynamic network outputs of the statnet ERGMs has demonstrated the need for consistent frameworks and data structures for expressing, storing, and manipulating information about networks that change in time. Motivated by our requirements for exchanging data among researchers and various analysis and visualization processes, we have created an R package dynamicnetwork that builds upon previous work in the network, statnet and sna packages and provides a limited functional implementation. This paper discusses design issues and considerations, describes classes and forms of dynamic data, and works through several examples to demonstrate the utility of the package. The functionality of the rSoNIA package that uses dynamicnetwork to exchange data with the Social Network Image Animator (SoNIA) software to create animated movies of changing networks from within R is also demonstrated.

Assembling and enriching digital library collections

People who create digital libraries need to gather together the raw material, add metadata as necessary, and design and build new collections. This paper sets out the requirements for these tasks and describes a new tool that supports them interactively, making it easy for users to create their own collections from electronic files of all types. The process involves selecting documents for inclusion, coming up with a suitable metadata set, assigning metadata to each document or group of documents, designing the form of the collection in terms of document formats, searchable indexes, and browsing facilities, building the necessary indexes and data structures, and putting the collection in place for others to use. Moreover, different situations require different workflows, and the system must be flexible enough to cope with these demands. Although the tool is specific to the Greenstone digital library software, the underlying ideas should prove useful in more general contexts