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Theory and practice in visual interfaces for semi-structured document discovery and selection
With the increase in electronic publications, and indeed the availability of existing publications in digital form, as well as the encouragement of open access publication, comes a challenge. That challenge is to create assistive software to aid in the discovery and selection of relevant documents to one’s information need. Visual interfaces have begun to address the need of information seekers in finding publications and wading through the large result sets that are returned from search engines. There is currently, little evidence to suggest that these interfaces are based on systematic research on requirements. In this article, we examine areas which contribute to the theory and practice of visual interfaces directly relating to the discovery and selection of publications. We bring together work from different fields in a targeted approach to assist the future creation of these interfaces
Evolutionary Design of Search and Triage Interfaces for Large Document Sets
This dissertation is concerned with the design of visual interfaces for searching and triaging large document sets. Data proliferation has generated new and challenging information-based tasks across various domains. Yet, as the document sets of these tasks grow, it has become increasingly difficult for users to remain active participants in the information-seeking process, such as when searching and triaging large document sets. During information search, users seek to understand their document set, align domain knowledge, formulate effective queries, and use those queries to develop document set mappings which help generate encounters with valued documents. During information triage, users encounter the documents mapped by information search to judge relevance to information-seeking objectives. Yet, information search and triage can be challenging for users. Studies have found that when using traditional design strategies in tool interfaces for search and triage, users routinely struggle to understand the domain being searched, apply their expertise, communicate their objectives during query building, and assess the relevance of search results during information triage. Users must understand and apply domain- specific vocabulary when communicating information-seeking objectives. Yet, task vocabularies typically do not align with those of users, especially in tasks of complex domains. Ontologies can be valuable mediating resources for bridging between the vocabularies of users and tasks. They are created by domain experts to provide a standardized mapping of knowledge that can be leveraged both by computational- as well as human-facing systems. We believe that the activation of ontologies within user-facing interfaces has a potential to help users when searching and triaging large document sets, however more research is required