Spatial Hypertext for Digital Library Users

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Spatial Hypertext for Digital Library Users

• George Buchanan, Ann Blandford,
• Matt Jones, Harold Thimbleby
• Interaction Design Centre
• Middlesex University
• London

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History Lessons

• Those who fail to learn from history are
  condemned to repeat its mistakes
• Economics
• Users dont want to do any extra work
• however, they are happy to get extra benefits
  for free
• e.g. Amazons customer profiling

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Information Seeking

• Wider process than vanilla Information
  Retrieval
• Information need formulation
• Search formulation
• IR
• Document review and selection
• Information need reformulation
• Highly iterative / Internally complex

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Spatial Hypertext

• Direct manipulation
• Document shown as a graphical item
• Uses visual cues (e.g. colour. shape) to suggest
  a documents role, type, age...
• Articulates uncertain and/or provisional nature
  of document groupings
• Documents can be grouped
• By proximity etc. or by hierarchy

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Spatial Hypertext State of Play

• Positive outcomes to user studies
• For supporting decision argumentation
• For supporting information triage
• Often loosely (if at all) connected to
  information systems
• Search behaviours are poorly defined
• Hard versus soft behaviours not well understood

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Spatial Parsing

• Introduced by Shipman in 1995
• Not a lexical parser
• Lexical fixed syntax-gtextract words from a
  stream-gtfind semantics
• Spatial unknown syntax-gtextract patterns from a
  space-gtprocess patterns to find semantics

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Garnet

• Spatial Hypertext for Digital Libraries
• Connects to the Greenstone DL using the
  Greenstone/CORBA protocol
• Similar to VIKI

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GarnetSpatial Parsing

• Currently has a simple (proximity) spatial
  parser
• Connects to a clustering system
• Gives a cluster profile for every pattern found
• Incoherent patterns are ignored
• Small patterns are ignored
• Double-click on label open in browser

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GarnetSpatial Parsing

• A search result can be scattered
• Placing search result labels next to groups of
  similar documents
• A document may appear next to no, one or many
  groups
• Search result list appears as usual
• Using user organisation of material to predict
  the role of future candidate documents

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Garnet - Search

• You can drag from search results to workspace
• Items can be deleted from search results
• Keeps a history

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Garnet - User Issues

• Common metaphors seem inconsistent
• e.g. deleting a document blacklisting versus
  returning
• User control versus automatic action
• Scattering
• Is it useful? Is the quality right?
• representation of certainty
• positioning

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Conclusion

• A lot of work to be done
• Far more questions than answers
• User evaluation needed
• Speed/space concerns with spatial parser