Onebox: Free-Text Interfaces as an Alternative to Complex Web Forms

This paper investigates the problem of translating free-text\ud queries into key-value pairs as an alternative means for searching `behind' web forms. We introduce a novel specication language for specifying free-text interfaces, and report the results of a user study where we evaluated our prototype in a travel planner scenario. Our results show that users prefer this free-text interface over the original web form and that they are about 9% faster on average at completing their search tasks

Student user preferences for features of next-generation OPACs: a case study of University of Sheffield international students

Purpose. The purpose of this study is to identity the features that international student users prefer for next generation OPACs. Design/ methodology/ approach. 16 international students of the University of Sheffield were interviewed in July 2008 to explore their preferences among potential features in next generation OPACs. A semi-structured interview schedule with images of mock-up screens was used. Findings. The results of the interviews were broadly consistent with previous studies. In general, students expect features in next generation OPACs should be save their time, easy to use and relevant to their search. This study found that recommender features and features that can provide better navigation of search results are desired by users. However, Web 2.0 features, such as RSS feeds and those features which involved user participation were among the most popular. Practical implications. This paper produces findings of relevance to any academic library seeking to implement a next-generation OPAC. Originality/value. There have been no previous published research studies of users’ preferences among possible features of next-generation OPACs

Designing a Semantically Rich Visual Iinterface for Cultural Digital Libraries Using the UNESCO Multilingual Thesaurus

This paper reports on the design of a visual user interface for the UNESCO digital portal. The interface makes use of the UNESCO multilingual thesaurus to provide visualized views of terms and their relationships and the way in which spaces associated with the thesaurus, the query and the results can be integrated into a single user interface.\u

Designing a semantically rich visual interface for cultural digital libraries using the UNEsCO multilingual thesaurus

This paper reports on the design of a visual user interface for the UNESCO digital portal. The interface makes use of the UNESCO multilingual thesaurus to provide visualized views of terms and their relationships and the way in which spaces associated with the thesaurus, the query and the results can be integrated into a single user interface

Extracting consumers needs for new products a web mining approach

Here we introduce a web mining approach for automatically identifying new product ideas extracted from web logs. A web log - also known as blog - is a web site that provides commentary, news, and further information on a subject written by individual persons. We can find a large amount of web logs for nearly each topic where consumers present their needs for new products. These new product ideas probably are valuable for producers as well as for researchers and developers. This is because they can lead to a new product development process. Finding these new product ideas is a well-known task in marketing. Therefore, with this automatic approach we support marketing activities by extracting new and useful product ideas from textual information in internet logs. This approach is implemented by a web-based application named Product Idea Web Log Miner where users from the marketing department provide descriptions of existing products. As a result, new product ideas are extracted from the web logs and presented to the users

Business Process Retrieval Based on Behavioral Semantics

This paper develops a framework for retrieving business processes considering search requirements based on behavioral semantics properties; it presents a framework called "BeMantics" for retrieving business processes based on structural, linguistics, and behavioral semantics properties. The relevance of the framework is evaluated retrieving business processes from a repository, and collecting a set of relevant business processes manually issued by human judges. The "BeMantics" framework scored high precision values (0.717) but low recall values (0.558), which implies that even when the framework avoided false negatives, it prone to false positives. The highest pre- cision value was scored in the linguistic criterion showing that using semantic inference in the tasks comparison allowed to reduce around 23.6 % the number of false positives. Using semantic inference to compare tasks of business processes can improve the precision; but if the ontologies are from narrow and specific domains, they limit the semantic expressiveness obtained with ontologies from more general domains. Regarding the perform- ance, it can be improved by using a filter phase which indexes business processes taking into account behavioral semantics propertie

The NASA Astrophysics Data System: The Search Engine and its User Interface

The ADS Abstract and Article Services provide access to the astronomical literature through the World Wide Web (WWW). The forms based user interface provides access to sophisticated searching capabilities that allow our users to find references in the fields of Astronomy, Physics/Geophysics, and astronomical Instrumentation and Engineering. The returned information includes links to other on-line information sources, creating an extensive astronomical digital library. Other interfaces to the ADS databases provide direct access to the ADS data to allow developers of other data systems to integrate our data into their system. The search engine is a custom-built software system that is specifically tailored to search astronomical references. It includes an extensive synonym list that contains discipline specific knowledge about search term equivalences. Search request logs show the usage pattern of the various search system capabilities. Access logs show the world-wide distribution of ADS users. The ADS can be accessed at http://adswww.harvard.eduComment: 23 pages, 18 figures, 11 table