Support in Finding and Implementing Search Strategies in Digital Libraries

Endbenutzern von modernen Informationssystemen fehlt es oft an strategischem oder prozeduralem Suchwissen. Diese fehlende Suchexpertise führt dazu, dass Benutzer auf ineffiziente und ineffektive Suchtaktiken und Strategien zurückgreifen. Ausgehend von dieser Problemstellung untersucht die Arbeit, wie ein Suchsystem unerfahrene Benutzer bei der Bildung und Durchführung von Suchstrategien für ihr Informationsproblem unterstützen kann. Basierend auf der parametrisierten Beschreibung von Suchsituationen und unter Einsatz bekannter Taktiken, die auf das Suchsystem Daffodil bezogen wurden, wird ein Vorschlagssystem für Suchtaktiken, -strategeme und Suchstrategien beschrieben. Es benutzt die Technik des fallbasierten Schließens, um aus den erfolgreichen Aktionen anderer Benutzer ein angemessenes Vorgehen für die aktuelle Situation des Suchenden vorzuschlagen. Daneben werden auch Vorschläge basierend auf den Suchergebnissen und auf Suchpfaden früherer Benutzer implementiert und untersucht, sowie die Kombination der verschiedenen Vorgehensweisen diskutiert. Zusätzlich zur Umsetzung für Daffodil erfolgte eine zweite Umsetzung für die Websuche mit Google als Erweiterung für den Browser Firefox. In einer zweiteiligen Evaluation des Vorschlagssystems wurden zunächst das grundsätzliche Konzept und die Benutzerschnittstelle mit positivem Ergebnis untersucht. Ein Folgeexperiment konnte die folgenden Hypothesen bestätigen: * Suchende finden mit Unterstützung mehr relevante Dokumente. * Unterstützte Suchende setzen häufiger fortgeschrittene Taktiken oder Werkzeuge ein. * Situativ angepasste Vorschläge helfen auch in späteren Suchen ohne Unterstützung. Im Rahmen des erprobten Lehrkonzeptes des software-realisierten Scaffolding wird das Vorschlagssystem in den größeren Zusammenhang einer geführten Suchunterstützung eingebettet. Anhand einer beispielhaften Aufgabe zeigt die Arbeit eine prototypische Umsetzung des Scaffoldings für die Suche in Daffodil. Dabei wird einem unerfahrenden Suchenden aufgezeigt, wie sich eine Suchaufgabe in Teilprobleme gliedern lässt und wie man die Werkzeuge des Systems zur Planung und Organisation der Suche einsetzen kann. Darüber hinaus wird ein Strategieframework zur Beschreibung und automatischen Umsetzung einfacher Suchstrategeme vorgestellt und in den Scaffolding-Prototypen integriert. Mit Hilfe des modularen Strategiesystems wurde ein Werkzeug implementiert, das eine existierende Dokumentenliste um zu diesen Dokumenten ähnliche ergänzt. Allen vorgestellten Methoden ist gemein, dass mit ihnen ein DL-System unerfahrene Benutzer bei der Bildung und bei der Durchführung einer Suchstrategie unterstützen kann. Die implementierten Werkzeuge und Frameworks erlauben darüber hinaus die Untersuchung weiterer Unterstützungsszenarien.End users of modern information systems often lack the necessary strategic or procedural search knowledge. This missing search expertise leads to the use of ineffectiv or inefficient search tactics and strategies. Based on this problem, this thesis examines different methods to support inexperienced users of a search system in building and executing search strategies for their information problem. Based on the parametrised description of search situations and using well-known tactics, which have been implemented for Daffodil, a recommendation or suggestion system for search tactics, stratagems and strategies is described. It uses the technique of case-based reasoning to suggest next steps for the user based on successful actions of previous users. In addition suggestions based on common search results and search paths have been implemented and are discussed in this thesis. A second implementation of the concept was done for web searching using the Google search engine and the Firefox web browser. A first evaluation of the suggester validated the general concept and the user interface. In a follow-up experiment the following hypotheses were confirmed: * Supported searchers find more relevant documents. * Supported searchers use more advanced tactics and tools. * Situational suggestions lead to better performance in future searches without support. Using the contept of software-realised scaffolding the suggestion system was included in the larger context of guided search support. A prototypical implementation of scaffolding for searching with Daffodil is described. Guided searching can help inexperienced users to divide their search problem in smaller sub tasks and use the tools of the search system to plan and organise their search. A strategy framework for automatically executing simple search strategems has also been integrated into the scaffolding prototype. Using the modular strategies a tool was developed to find additional similar documents for a given list of documents. All the methods described have in common that they can aid inexperienced searchers in building and executing search strategies. The implemented tools and frameworks also allow further research on additional support scenarios

Adaptive Search Suggestions for Digital Libraries

Abstract. In this paper, an adaptive tool for providing suggestions during the information search process is presented. The tool uses case-based reasoning techniques to find the most useful suggestions for a given situation by comparing them to a case base of previous situations and adapting the solution. The tool can learn from user participation. A small, preliminary evaluation showed a high acceptance of the tool, even if improvements are still needed

Supporting collaborative improvement of resources in the Khresmoi health information system

Since medical knowledge relies on both scientific knowledge and real-life experience, the importance of user contributions to improve resources in health systems cannot be underestimated. We present work from the Khresmoi project which aims to develop a multilingual multimodal search and access system for biomedical information and documents. Khresmoi targets three distinct user classes with differing levels of medical knowledge and information requirements, namely: general public, general practitioners, and, as an example of an area of clinical expertise, radiologists. The Khresmoi system will provide these users with valuable (whose quality has been evaluated and approved) and enriched (meta information from biomedical knowledge bases is added) medical information, selected to fit their medical knowledge and their preferred language. The system will include novel collaborative components of the system are designed to provide means for users to contribute to the system’s knowledge by adding or correcting annotations to the documents, as well as a collaborative platform where they will be able to share their own files and both annotate and discuss them

Khresmoi professional: multilingual, multimodal professional medical search

In this demonstration we present the Khresmoi medical search and access system. The system uses a component based architecture housed in the cloud to support target users medical information needs. This includes web systems, computer applications and mobile applications to support the multilingual and multimodal information needs of three test target groups: the general public, general practitioners (GPs) and radiologists. This demonstration presents the systems for GPs and radiologists providing multilingual text and image based (including 2D and 3D radiology images) search functionality

Khresmoi Professional: Multilingual Semantic Search for Medical Professionals

There is increasing interest in and need for innovative solutions to medical search. In this paper we present the EU funded Khresmoi medical search and access system, currently in year 3 of 4 of development across 12 partners . The Khresmoi system uses a component based architecture housed in the cloud to allow for the development of several innovative applications to support target users medical information needs. The Khresmoi search systems based on this architecture have been designed to support the multilingual and multimod al information needs of three target groups the general public, general practitioners and consultant radiologists. In this paper we focus on the presentation of the systems to support the latter two groups using semantic, multilingual text and image based (including 2D and 3D radiology images) search

Khresmoi – multilingual semantic search of medical text and images

The Khresmoi project is developing a multilingual multimodal search and access system for medical and health information and documents. This scientific demonstration presents the current state of the Khresmoi integrated system, which includes components for text and image annotation, semantic search, search by image similarity and machine translation. The flexibility in adapting the system to varying requirements for different types of medical information search is demonstrated through two instantiations of the system, one aimed at medical professionals in general and the second aimed at radiologists. The key innovations of the Khresmoi system are the integration of multiple software components in a flexible scalable medical search system, the use of annotation cycles including manual correction to improve semantic search, and the possibility to do large scale visual similarity search on 2D and 3D (CT, MR) medical images

A query language and user interface for XML information retrieval

As XML is about to become the standard format for structured documents, there is an increasing need for appropriate information retrieval (IR) methods. Since classical IR methods were developed for unstructured documents only, the logical markup of XML documents poses new challenges