A user-centered interface for information exploration in a hetergeneous digital library

The advent of the heterogeneous digital library provides the opportunity and establishes the need for the design of new user interfaces. As a single portal to a wide array of information sources, the heterogeneous digital library requires that a variety of cataloging schemas, subject domains, document genres, and institutional biases be accommodated. SenseMaker is a user-centered interface for information exploration in a heterogeneous digital library. It unifies citations and articles from heterogeneous sources by presenting them in a common schema with affordances for quick comparisons of properties. At the same time, SenseMaker users can recover a degree of context by iteratively organizing citations and articles into higher-level bundles based on either metadata or content. Furthermore, SenseMaker enables users to move fluidly from browsing to searching by introducing structure-based searching and structure-based filtering. This paper outlines the SenseMaker interface design and details some of our experimental findings surrounding its use.

[1]  Marti A. Hearst,et al.  Cat-a-Cone: an interactive interface for specifying searches and viewing retrieval results using a large category hierarchy , 1997, SIGIR '97.

[2]  Michael David Williams,et al.  What Makes RABBIT Run? , 1984, Int. J. Man Mach. Stud..

[3]  Luis Gravano,et al.  The Stanford Digital Library metadata architecture , 1997, International Journal on Digital Libraries.

[4]  Alan R. Simon,et al.  Understanding the New SQL: A Complete Guide , 1993 .

[5]  Moshé M. Zloof.  Query by example , 1975, AFIPS '75.

[6]  Tony J. Brown.  Visual Display Highlighting and Information Extraction , 1991 .

[7]  Peter Willett,et al.  Recent trends in hierarchic document clustering: A critical review , 1988, Inf. Process. Manag..

[8]  Robin Jeffries,et al.  Orienteering in an information landscape: how information seekers get from here to there , 1993, INTERCHI.

[9]  Terry Winograd,et al.  SenseMaker: an information-exploration interface supporting the contextual evolution of a user's interests , 1997, CHI.

[10]  Andreas Paepcke,et al.  Using Distributed Objects for Digital Library Interoperability , 1996, Computer.

[11]  Michelle Q. Wang Baldonado,et al.  An interactive, structure-mediated approach to exploring information in a heterogeneous, distributed environment , 1997 .

[12]  Stuart K. Card,et al.  The cost structure of sensemaking , 1993, INTERCHI.

[13]  Wilfred J. Hansen.  User engineering principles for interactive systems , 1972, AFIPS '71 (Fall).

[14]  Jakob Nielsen,et al.  Usability engineering , 1997, The Computer Science and Engineering Handbook.

[15]  Edward A. Fox,et al.  SorTables: a browser for a digital library , 1995, CIKM '95.

[16]  Ricardo Baeza-Yates,et al.  Information Retrieval: Data Structures and Algorithms , 1992 .

[17]  Jade Goldstein-Stewart,et al.  Using aggregation and dynamic queries for exploring large data sets , 1994, CHI.

[18]  Edward A. Fox,et al.  Envision: a user-centered database of computer science literature , 1995, CACM.

[19]  Terry Winograd,et al.  Hi-cites: dynamically created citations with active highlighting , 1998, CHI.

[20]  Nicholas J. Belkin,et al.  Braque: Design of an Interface to Support User Interaction in Information Retrieval , 1993, Inf. Process. Manag..

[21]  Bohdan S. Wynar,et al.  Introduction to Cataloging and Classification , 1991 .

[22]  Angelo Monfroglio.  Book review: Prime Time Freeware for AI by Mark Kantrowitz (Editor) (Prime Time Freeware, 1994) , 1996, SGAR.

[23]  Marcia J. Bates,et al.  The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the online search interface , 1989 .

[24]  Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang,et al.  Boolean Query Mapping Across Heterogeneous Information Sources , 1996, IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng..

[25]  Marti A. Hearst,et al.  Scatter/gather browsing communicates the topic structure of a very large text collection , 1996, CHI.

[26]  Andreas Paepcke,et al.  The digital library integrated task environment (DLITE) , 1997, DL '97.

[27]  Geerd Philipsen,et al.  Effects of six different highlighting modes on visual search performance in menu options , 1994, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Interact..

[28]  Hsinchun Chen,et al.  A Parallel Computing Approach to Creating Engineering Concept Spaces for Semantic Retrieval: The Illinois Digital Library Initiative Project , 1996, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[29]  Michelle Q. Wang Baldonado,et al.  Real-Time Full-Text Clustering of Networked Documents , 1997, AAAI/IAAI.

[30]  Marti A. Hearst.  Using Categories to Provide Context for Full-Text Retrieval Results , 1994, RIAO.

[31]  Jeff A. Johnson,et al.  The Xerox Star: a retrospective , 1989, Computer.

[32]  D. K. Harmon,et al.  Overview of the Third Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-3) , 1996 .

[33]  Louis M. Gomez,et al.  No IFs, ANDs, or ORs: A Study of Database Querying , 1990, Int. J. Man Mach. Stud..

[34]  Ramana Rao,et al.  An organic user interface for searching citation links , 1995, CHI '95.

[35]  Gary Marchionini,et al.  Information Seeking in Electronic Environments , 1995 .

[36]  Dee Andy Michel,et al.  Library research models: A guide to classification, cataloging and computers: Mann, Thomas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 248 pp. $22.50 (ISBN: 0-19-5-8190-0). , 1994 .