PATHS in Context: User Characteristics and the Construction of Cultural Heritage Narratives

There is ample evidence of the influence of individual differences on information-seeking behaviours. Trailways and paths are increasingly important objects to support internet navigation. The EU-funded PATHS (Personalised Access to Cultural Heritage) project is investigating ways of assisting users with exploring a large collection of cultural heritage material taken from Europeana, the European aggregator for museums, archives, libraries, and galleries. A prototype system has been developed that includes innovative functionality for exploring the collection based on Google map-style interfaces, data-driven taxonomies, and supporting the manual creation of guided tours or paths along with the use of personalised (and nonpersonalised) recommendations to promote information discovery. After analysing the paths created by participants during an extended user evaluation, this paper discusses the effect of individual differences on path creation and characteristics

PATHS in Context: User Characteristics and the Construction of Cultural Heritage Narratives

There is ample evidence of the influence of individual differences on information-seeking behaviours. Trailways and paths are increasingly important objects to support internet navigation. The EU-funded PATHS (Personalised Access to Cultural Heritage) project is investigating ways of assisting users with exploring a large collection of cultural heritage material taken from Europeana, the European aggregator for museums, archives, libraries, and galleries. A prototype system has been developed that includes innovative functionality for exploring the collection based on Google map-style interfaces, data-driven taxonomies, and supporting the manual creation of guided tours or paths along with the use of personalised (and nonpersonalised) recommendations to promote information discovery. After analysing the paths created by participants during an extended user evaluation, this paper discusses the effect of individual differences on path creation and characteristics

MedTextus: An Ontology-enhanced Medical Portal

In this paper we describe MedTextus, an online medical search portal with dynamic search and browse tools. To search for information, MedTextus lets users request synonyms and related terms specifically tailored to their query. A mapping algorithm dynamically builds the query context based on the UMLS ontology and then selects thesaurus terms that fit this context. Users can add these terms to their query and meta-search five medical databases. To facilitate browsing, the search results can be reviewed as a list of documents per database, as a set of folders into which all the documents are automatically categorized based on their content, and as a map that is built on the fly. We designed a user study to compare these dynamic support tools with the static query support of NLM Gateway and report on initial results for the search task. The users used NLM Gateway more effectively, but used MedTextus more efficiently and preferred its query formation tools

Searching the web: The impact of user knowledge on search satisfaction

Searching on the web is a tedious process as it requires knowledge and skills on what and how to search.What to search is basically, the core of the searching activity as it represents the need of the searcher.How to search is related to the knowledge on how the facilities available on the web can be utilized in order to achieve the needs. Search satisfaction is the level of measurement that describes the achievement of the searcher towards his/her information needs.In this paper, two categories of knowledge: topic understanding and web search system understanding have been identified to contribute to the search satisfaction.The Linear Regression analysis confirms that both topic and search system understanding are equally important since they are significantly associated with search satisfaction

Building Web Directories in Different Languages for Decision Support: A Semi-Automatic Approach

Web directories organize voluminous information into hierarchical structures, helping users to quickly locate relevant information and to support decision-making. The development of existing Web directories either relies on expert participation that may not be available or uses automatic approaches that lack precision. As more users access the Web in their native languages, better approaches to organizing and developing non-English Web directories are needed. In this paper, we have proposed a semi-automatic approach to building domain-specific Web directories in different languages by combining human precision and machine efficiency. Using the approach, we have built Web directories in the Spanish business (SBiz) and Arabic medical (AMed) domains. Experimental results show that the SBiz and AMed directories achieved significantly better recall, F value, and satisfaction rating than benchmark directories. These encouraging results show that the approach can be used to build high-quality Web directories to support decision-making

Investigating the information-seeking behaviour of academic lawyers: From Ellis's model to design.

Information-seeking is important for lawyers, who have access to many dedicated electronic resources.However there is considerable scope for improving the design of these resources to better support information-seeking. One way of informing design is to use information-seeking models as theoretical lenses to analyse users’ behaviour with existing systems. However many models, including those informed by studying lawyers, analyse information-seeking at a high level of abstraction and are only likely to lead to broad-scoped design insights. We illustrate that one potentially useful (and lowerlevel) model is Ellis’s - by using it as a lens to analyse and make design suggestions based on the information-seeking behaviour of twenty-seven academic lawyers, who were asked to think aloud whilst using electronic legal resources to find information for their work. We identify similar information-seeking behaviours to those originally found by Ellis and his colleagues in scientific domains, along with several that were not identified in previous studies such as ‘updating’ (which we believe is particularly pertinent to legal information-seeking). We also present a refinement of Ellis’s model based on the identification of several levels that the behaviours were found to operate at and the identification of sets of mutually exclusive subtypes of behaviours

Creative search using pataphysics

This paper looks at defining, analysing and practicing how creativity can be applied to search tools. It defines creativity with respect to search and discusses how these concepts could be applied in software engineering using principles from the pseudo-philosophy of pataphysics. The aim of the proposed tool is to generate surprising, novel, humorous and provocative search results instead of purely relevant ones, in order to inspire a more creative interaction between a user, their information need and the application. A proof-of-concept prototype is described to justify the ideas presented before implications and future work are discussed

Instructional Support for Enhancing Students’ Information Problem Solving Ability

Brand-Gruwel, S., & Gerjets, P. (Eds.). (2008). Instructional Support for Enhancing Students’ Information Problem Solving Ability [Special issue]. Computers in Human Behavior, 24(3).This special issue discusses European research on instructional support to foster students’ ability to solve information-based problems. In this introduction, the concept of information problem solving (IPS) and research in this field of interest will be placed in the broader perspective, which is called information behavior. The focus of this special issue is an educational one and the papers all go into a specific kind of instructional support. The main research questions, findings and conclusions of the six contributions will be outlined. It is concluded that the most important directions for future research deal with how instructional support for different aspect of the process, like for instance how to regulated the process, best can be designed in order to make the instruction adaptive and fit to the learners needs

Searching for Non-English Web Content: An Empirical Study of the Spanish Business Intelligence Portal

As non-English-speaking online populations grow rapidly, there are increasing needs to support searching for non-English Web content. Prior research has assumed English to be the primary language for Web searching, but this is not the case for many non-English-speaking regions. For example, Latin America will have the fastest growing population in the coming decades but existing Spanish search engines lack search, browse, and analysis capabilities. In this paper, we have proposed a language-independent approach to supporting non-English Web searching. Based on the approach, we have developed the Spanish Business Intelligence Portal (SBizPort) to support searching, browsing, summarization, categorization, and visualization of Web information. Results from an empirical study involving Spanish subjects show that the portal achieved significantly better user ratings on information quality, cross-regional search capability, and overall satisfaction than the benchmark search portal. This study thus contributes to human-computer interaction research on non-English Web searching