Dynamic Taxonomies and Intelligent User-Centric Access to Complex Portal Information

One of the key requirements of portals is easy access to information, or findability according to Morville’s definition (Morville, 2002). After a decade of using traditional access paradigms, such as queries on structured database systems and information retrieval or search engines, the feeling that “search does not work” and “information is too hard to find” is now reaching a consensus level. The problem is that traditional access paradigms are not suited to most search tasks, that are exploratory and imprecise in essence: the user needs to explore the information base, find relationships among concepts and think alternatives out in a guided way. New access paradigms supporting exploration are needed. Since the goal is end-user interactive access, a holistic approach in which modeling, interface and interaction issues are considered together, must be used and will be discussed in the following.