Seeking creativity: A case study on information problem solving in professional music

This study explored the information seeking behavior of a professional jazz musician during creative work. It aimed at revealing information seeking activities necessary to execute present-day musical projects. A single case was studied in depth. First, a narrative interview was conducted to reveal project phases and corresponding information seeking behavior. Second, hereupon a semi-structured interview was taken to identify information seeking activities per phase. Results indicate that the musician deliberately searched for musical information especially in the first project phases. The internet was used as main source. Both data and goal driven strategies were applied, of which the latter were relatively scarce. This means that in this case the musician sporadically searched information based on a contemplated search plan. Future research should aim at generalizing findings of this case. It should further validate the underlying analytical framework that proved to be useful for describing and categorizing musical information seeking behavior

Exploring Large Digital Library Collections Using a Map-Based Visualisation

In this paper we describe a novel approach for exploring large document collections using a map-based visualisation. We use hierarchically structured semantic concepts that are attached to the documents to create a visualisation of the semantic space that resembles a Google Map. The approach is novel in that we exploit the hierarchical structure to enable the approach to scale to large document collections and to create a map where the higher levels of spatial abstraction have semantic meaning. An informal evaluation is carried out to gather subjective feedback from users. Overall results are positive with users finding the visualisation enticing and easy to use

An Empirical Study of User Navigation during Document Triage

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενοDocument triage is the moment in the information seeking process when the user first decides the relevance of a document to their information need[17]. This paper reports a study of user behaviour during document triage. The study reveals two main findings: first, that there is a small set of common navigational patterns; second, that certain document features strongly influence users’ navigation

Discovering the Unfindable: The Tension Between Findability and Discoverability in a Bookshop Designed for Serendipity

Serendipity is a key aspect of user experience, particularly in the context of information acquisition - where it is known as information encountering. Unexpectedly encountering interesting or useful information can spark new insights while surprising and delighting. However, digital environments have been designed primarily for goal-directed seeking over loosely-directed exploration, searching over discovering. In this paper we examine a novel physical environment - a bookshop designed primarily for serendipity - for cues as to how information encountering might be helped or hindered by digital design. Naturalistic observations and interviews revealed it was almost impossible for participants to find specific books or topics other than by accident. But all unexpectedly encoun-tered interesting books, highlighting a tension between findability and discoverability. While some of the bookshop’s design features enabled information en-countering, others inhibited it. However, encountering was resilient, as it occurred despite participants finding it hard to understand the purpose of even those features that did enable it. Findings suggest the need to consider how transparent or opaque the purpose of design features should be and to balance structure and lack of it when designing digital environments for findability and discoverability

Ontology-based end-user visual query formulation: Why, what, who, how, and which?

Value creation in an organisation is a time-sensitive and data-intensive process, yet it is often delayed and bounded by the reliance on IT experts extracting data for domain experts. Hence, there is a need for providing people who are not professional developers with the flexibility to pose relatively complex and ad hoc queries in an easy and intuitive way. In this respect, visual methods for query formulation undertake the challenge of making querying independent of users’ technical skills and the knowledge of the underlying textual query language and the structure of data. An ontology is more promising than the logical schema of the underlying data for guiding users in formulating queries, since it provides a richer vocabulary closer to the users’ understanding. However, on the one hand, today the most of world’s enterprise data reside in relational databases rather than triple stores, and on the other, visual query formulation has become more compelling due to ever-increasing data size and complexity—known as Big Data. This article presents and argues for ontology-based visual query formulation for end-users; discusses its feasibility in terms of ontology-based data access, which virtualises legacy relational databases as RDF, and the dimensions of Big Data; presents key conceptual aspects and dimensions, challenges, and requirements; and reviews, categorises, and discusses notable approaches and systems

Mapping recent information behavior research: an analysis of co-authorship and cocitation networks

There has been an increase in research published on information behavior in recent years, and this has been accompanied by an increase in its diversity and interaction with other fields, particularly information retrieval (HR). The aims of this study are to determine which researchers have contributed to producing the current body of knowledge on this subject, and to describe its intellectual basis. A bibliometric and network analysis was applied to authorship and co-authorship as well as citation and co-citation. According to these analyses, there is a small number of authors who can be considered to be the most productive and who publish regularly, and a large number of transient ones. Other findings reveal a marked predominance of theoretical works, some examples of qualitative methodology that originate in other areas of social science, and a high incidence of research focused on the user interaction with information retrieval systems and the information behavior of doctors

Surgical margins in breast conservation

Breast cancer is the most common tumor affecting women worldwide. Breast-conserving therapy (BCT) followed by irradiation nowadays is the treatment of choice for early-stage disease; there is no difference in long-term survival between mastectomy and BCT combined with external radiotherapy. A positive margin is associated with increased risk of local recurrences after BCT for invasive breast cancer and ductal carcinoma in situ. The exact definition of an adequate surgical margin after breast cancer resection has long been debated among physicians and represents an area of considerable variation in clinical practice. There is a lack of standardization in the pathology methods of margin evaluation, which yields little consensus regarding what constitutes an adequate negative margin. As a consequence, patient management varies widely based on the threshold that surgeons accept for adequate margins and the subsequent need for re-excision. We analyze and discuss recent literature about this topic both from the pathological and from the surgical point of vie