ISYS 300 Week 9 Browsing

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ISYS 300 -- Week 9Browsing Output
Representation

• Dr. Xia Lin
• Associate Professor
• College of Information Science and Technology
• Drexel University

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Effective Information Retrieval

• Iteration
• Relevance Feedback
• Use User's Profiles
• Browsing/Interactive Searching
• Graphical Display of Search Results

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Browsing

• Browsing is an act of human information seeking
• a mental process of identifying and choosing
  information
• a dynamic process that varies in time and depends
  on intermediate results.
• a part of process of decision making, problem
  solving, etc.

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Browsing for Information Retrieval

• A kind of searching process in which the initial
  search criteria or goals are only partly defined
• general-purpose web browsing
• An art of not knowing what one wants until one
  finds it
• visual recognition
• content recognition

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Browsing for Information Retrieval

• A learning activity that emphasizes structures
  and interactive process
• exploratory
• movements based on feedback
• A process of finding and navigating in a unknown
  or unfamiliar information space
• becoming aware of new contents
• finding unexpected results

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Search or Browse?

• Would you like to search using a search engine or
  would you like to browse from pages to pages (or
  through a hierarchy)?
• Depend on what?

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Search or Browse?
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Factors of browsing

• Purposes
• Fact retrieval
• Concept formation or interpretation
• Current awareness
• Tasks
• Well-defined tasks
• Ill-defined tasks
• number of items to browse

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Factors of browsing

• Individual characteristics
• Motivation
• Experience and knowledge
• Cognitive styles
• Context
• Subject disciplines
• Organizational schemes
• Nature of text/information
• Medium
• Does the system support browsing?

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IR Systems that support browsing

• Good navigation tools
• Easy to move from one item to another
• Links
• good structures
• fast access
• Easy to back track
• Correct any errors
• make new selections

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IR Systems that support browsing

• Good displays
• easy to read
• meaningful orders of retrieval results
• graphical presentation
• Meaningful content organization
• contextual hierarchical structures
• Grouping of related items
• Contextual landmarks

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why just browse when you can fly?

• HotSauce is an innovative 3D fly-through
  interface for navigating information spaces. It
  was developed, largely as a one-man effort, by
  Ramanathan V. Guha while at Apple Research in the
  mid-1990s. HotSauce was a specific 3D
  spatialization of the Meta Content Framework
  (MCF) also developed by Guha.

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HotSauce
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Visual Search Engines

• TheBrain
• Mooter
• Kartoo
• MapStan
• Grokker
• ToughGraph
• StarNight
• NewsLink

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WebBrainhttp//www.webbrain.com/
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Mooter http//www.mooter.com/
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Kartoo http//www.kartoo.com/
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MapStan http//search.mapstan.com/
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Grokker

• http//www.groxis.com/service/grok/g_products.html
  

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Touchgraph

• http//www.touchgraph.com/

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Galaxy of News Rennison 95
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Galaxy of News Rennison 95
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Starrynight from RHIZOME
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KartOO.com
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(No Transcript)
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Concept Visualization

• AltaVista LiveTopic
• HiBrowse Interface
• SemioMap
• Hyperbolic Trees
• Visual Thesaurus
• Visual Concept Explorer

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Alta Vistas LiveTopic
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ConceptSpace
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HiBrowse Interface
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SemioMap
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Inxight.com
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Topic Maps

• Highwire http//www.highwire.org

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Visual Thesaurus
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Visual Concept Explorer
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Concept Mapping
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(No Transcript)
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MedLine Search
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Is Web easy to browsing?

• How many pages do you browse after a search?
• Getting loss in the web?
• Dont know where you are
• Dont know why you get here?
• Dont know how to get to the place you want to be
• The Web is not visible !

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Architecting Browsable Websites

• Design site structures
• Metaphor Exploration
• Organizational metaphors
• Functional metaphors
• Visual metaphors
• Define Navigation
• Global navigation
• Local navigation
• Design Document

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Information Architecture

• To support browsing, a good structure is
  essential.
• A new field of study is focusing on structures of
  information
• Information Structure

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Information Architecture

• "Information architecture involves the design of
  organization and navigation systems to help
  people find and manage information more
  successfully."

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Information Architecture

• Information architecture is the science of
  figuring out what you want your site to do and
  then constructing a blueprint before you dive in
  and put the thing together.
• Information Architecture Tutorial by John Shiple

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Information Architecture

• Deals with the construction of a structure or the
  organization of information.
• In a traditional library, information
  architecture is a combination of the catalog
  system and the physical design of the building.
• On the Web, information architecture is a
  combination of organizing a site's content into
  categories and creating an interface to support
  those categories.

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Information Architecture

• Focuses on structures
• Display structures and link structures
• Content and semantic structures.
• The integration of displays and contents.
• Focuses on USABILITY
• Searching
• Browsing
• Navigation

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What do real architects think of information
architecture?

• Architects vs. Information Architects
• Architects deal with space
• Is information in space or space in information?
• Architects deal with structures
• Physical structures in the physical space.
• Liquid structures in the information space.
• Architects deal with designs
• Construction of the environment people physically
  interact with
• Design of virtual environment people interact
  with.

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Focusing on Design

• Information Architecture deals with
• Information Design
• Navigation Design
• Interaction Design
• Visual Design
• User Design
• Experience Design

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Output presentation

• Two major issues
• What information to present?
• How to organize the output items?
• Information in the output display
• Traditional databases
• Document reference numbers (unique number)
• Citations (author, title, source)
• Document surrogate (citation plus abstract and/or
  indexing terms)
• fulltext

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• On the web
• title, url
• First few sentences/related sentences/summaries
• Dates / page sizes
• Degree of relevance
• special links
• find similar one
• Types of links
• Related categories

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• What other information you may wish to have in
  the retrieval output?
• Citations (or links from this document)?
• Critique or evaluation?
• Access information (how many times it was
  accessed in last 6 months)?
• Links to this document
• Author contact information ?
• Why documents were retrieved?

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Output organization

• Linear
• a list of documents
• listed by
• best match
• alphabetical orders
• dates
• order of selected fields (authors, titles, web
  sites)

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• Linear display
• Practical and most popular
• easy to generate
• users know how to use it
• Did not shown relationships among documents!
• Document relationships are more complex than a
  linear one

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• Hierarchical display
• Separate data into different levels or branches
• Branches can be expanded/collapsed.
• Show more data in less space
• Show the organization of the data

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• Graphical displays
• Show more complex relationships
• Use location, colors, dimensions, etc to
  represent documents, terms or concepts.
• Provide more interactive functions

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VIRI -- Visual Information Retrieval Interfaces

• 2-dimensional graphical display
• use graphical objects (icons, dots etc.) to
  represent documents
• Use geographical relationships to indicate
  document relationships
• use colors to group/differentiate documents
• use animation to assist interaction

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AltaVista
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Inxight.com
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Citation Mapping
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Citation Mapping

• AuthorLink

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VIRI

• Advantages
• More representational power
• show more information in a limited screen space
• many different ways to group documents
• can put both keywords and documents in the same
  2-dimensional space
• Provide good overview
• Provide more interaction

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VIRI

• Disadvantages
• Difficult to generate
• Not always easy to understand
• Many not be specific enough
• Hard to use