Designing Interfaces to Support Collaboration in Information Retrieval

Information retrieval systems should acknowledge the existence of collaboration in the search process. Collaboration can help users to be more effective in both learning systems and in using them. We consider some issues of viewing interfaces to information retrieval systems as collaborative notations and how to build systems that more actively support collaboration. We describe a system that embodies just one kind of explicit support; a graphical representation of the search process that can be manipulated and discussed by the users. By acknowledging the importance of other people in the search process, we can develop systems that not only improve help-giving by people but which can lead to a more robust search activity, more able to cope with, and indeed exploit, the failures of any intelligent agents used

Interactive context-aware user-driven metadata correction in digital libraries

Personal name variants are a common problem in digital libraries, reducing the precision of searches and complicating browsing-based interaction. The book-centric approach of name authority control has not scaled to match the growth and diversity of digital repositories. In this paper, we present a novel system for user-driven integration of name variants when interacting with web-based information-in particular digital library-systems. We approach these issues via a client-side JavaScript browser extension that can reorganize web content and also integrate remote data sources. Designed to be agnostic towards the web sites it is applied to, we illustrate the developed proof-of-concept system through worked examples using three different digital libraries. We discuss the extensibility of the approach in the context of other user-driven information systems and the growth of the Semantic Web

Constructing digital library interfaces

The software technologies used to create web interfaces for digital libraries are discussed using examples from Greenstone 3

That's 'é' not 'þ' '?' or '☐': a user-driven context-aware approach to erroneous metadata in digital libraries

In this paper we present a novel system for user-driven integration of name variants when interacting with web-based information systems. The growth and diversity of online information means that many users experience disambiguation and collocation errors in their information searching. We approach these issues via a client-side JavaScript browser extension that can reorganise web content and also integrate remote data sources. The system is illustrated through three worked examples using existing digital libraries

Usability discussions in open source development

The public nature of discussion in open source projects provides a valuable resource for understanding the mechanisms of open source software development. In this paper we explore how open source projects address issues of usability. We examine bug reports of several projects to characterise how developers address and resolve issues concerning user interfaces and interaction design. We discuss how bug reporting and discussion systems can be improved to better support bug reporters and open source developers

Recommendation, collaboration and social search

This chapter considers the social component of interactive information retrieval: what is the role of other people in searching and browsing? For simplicity we begin by considering situations without computers. After all, you can interactively retrieve information without a computer; you just have to interact with someone or something else. Such an analysis can then help us think about the new forms of collaborative interactions that extend our conceptions of information search, made possible by the growth of networked ubiquitous computing technology. Information searching and browsing have often been conceptualized as a solitary activity, however they always have a social component. We may talk about 'the' searcher or 'the' user of a database or information resource. Our focus may be on individual uses and our research may look at individual users. Our experiments may be designed to observe the behaviors of individual subjects. Our models and theories derived from our empirical analyses may focus substantially or exclusively on an individual's evolving goals, thoughts, beliefs, emotions and actions. Nevertheless there are always social aspects of information seeking and use present, both implicitly and explicitly. We start by summarizing some of the history of information access with an emphasis on social and collaborative interactions. Then we look at the nature of recommendations, social search and interfaces to support collaboration between information seekers. Following this we consider how the design of interactive information systems is influenced by their social elements

The inverse eigenvalue problem for quantum channels

Given a list of n complex numbers, when can it be the spectrum of a quantum channel, i.e., a completely positive trace preserving map? We provide an explicit solution for the n=4 case and show that in general the characterization of the non-zero part of the spectrum can essentially be given in terms of its classical counterpart - the non-zero spectrum of a stochastic matrix. A detailed comparison between the classical and quantum case is given. We discuss applications of our findings in the analysis of time-series and correlation functions and provide a general characterization of the peripheral spectrum, i.e., the set of eigenvalues of modulus one. We show that while the peripheral eigen-system has the same structure for all Schwarz maps, the constraints imposed on the rest of the spectrum change immediately if one departs from complete positivity.Comment: 16 page