In this paper we review studies of the growth of the Internet and technologies that are useful for information search and retrieval on the Web. We present data on the Internet from several different sources, e.g., current as well as projected number of users, hosts, and Web sites. Although numerical figures vary, overall trends cited

To aid designers of digital library interfaces, we present a framework for the design of information representations in terms of previews and overviews. Previews and overviews are graphic or textual representations of information abstracted from primary information objects. Previews act as surrogates for one or a few objects and overviews represent collections of objects. A design framework is elaborated in terms of the following three dimensions: (1) What information objects are available to users, (2) How information objects are related and displayed, and (3) How users can manipulate information objects. When utilized properly, previews and overviews allow users to rapidly discriminate objects of interest from those not of interest, and to more fully understand the scope and nature of digital libraries. This paper presents a definition of previews and overviews in context, provides design guidelines, and describes four example applications.

This paper reports fieldwork from the electrical utilities industry, examining the suitability of current knowledge management perspectives to the day-to-day work of mobile staff. Reporting the results of the empirical study, we make a distinction between four aspects of local and mobile "knowledge management" as it took place in the mobile work setting: sharing, i.e., several parties exchange knowledge; indexing, i.e., one party explains to another what knowledge to retrieve; diagnosing, i.e., two parties make sense of how to interpret a situation, and; foreseeing, i.e., one party (or more) uses knowledge to project the future. We compare and contrast the empirical findings with current knowledge management perspectives, and outline an initial sketch of a framework for "practical knowledge management."

Users make journeys through the Web. Web travel encompasses the tasks of orientation and navigation, the environment and the purpose of the journey. The ease of travel, its mobility, varies from page to page and site to site. For visually impaired users, in particular, mobility is reduced; the objects that support travel are inaccessible or missing altogether. Web development tools need to include support to increase mobility. We present a framework for finding and classifying travel objects within Web pages. The evaluation carried out has shown that this framework supports a systematic and consistent method for assessing travel upon the Web. We propose that such a framework can provide the foundation for a semi-automated tool for the support of travel upon the Web.

In the rationalistic perspective, the human expert is seen as a data-processing system having properties similar to computers. As a consequence, the design of man-machine interfaces, workplaces, and organizational procedures has been mainly driven by technological advances, focusing on replacing humans rather than supporting their actual needs. A more appropriate explanation of human cognition is based on the notion of situatedness: human cognition is considered to be emergent from the interaction of the human with the environment, i.e., the current situation the human is involved in. More generally spoken, the systemenvironment coupling is a prerequisite of cognition and cannot be abstracted away. In this paper, we summarize the rationalistic perspective, its pitfalls, and its (undesirable) influences on design. As an alternative, we propose "Situated Design", a design methodology capitalizing on the notion of the human as a situated agent. We demonstrate how "Situated Design" can be ...

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations -- a theory for representing and reasoning about dialogs based on partial input. It supports multiple interaction interfaces, and offers sessioning, caching, and co-ordination functions through the use of an interaction manager. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the promise of this approach.

. The Informedia Digital Video Library contains over a thousand hours of video, consuming over a terabyte of disk space. This paper summarizes the multimedia abstractions used to represent this video in prior systems and introduces the visualization techniques employed to browse and navigate multiple video documents at once. Keywords: digital video library, information visualization, multimedia abstraction 1. Introduction The Informedia Project at Carnegie Mellon University deals primarily with video. The goal of the project is to enable full content search and retrieval from digital video libraries (Christel et al., 1996; Wactlar et al., 1997). Consider the task of trying to find a five-minute video clip of interest from a library of a thousand hour-long videotapes. In the analog domain, this task would be interminable and the frustrated user would probably walk away without completing the task. Simply digitizing the video will not make the job easier. Through the use of speech rec...

Movement, or mobility, is key to the accessibility, design, and usability of many hypermedia resources (websites); and key to good mobility is context and preview by probing. This is especially the case for visually impaired users when a hypertext anchor is inaccurately described or is described out of context. This means confusion and disorientation. Mobility is similarly reduced when the link target of the anchor has no relationship to the expected information present on the hypertext node (web-page). We suggest that confident movement with purpose, ease, and accuracy can only be achieved when complete contextual information and an accurate description of the proposed destination (preview) are available. Our past work (1) deriving mobility heuristics from mobility models, (2) transforming web-pages based on these heuristics, and (3) building tools to analyse and access these transformed pages; has shown us that a tool to expand context and preview would be useful. In this paper we describe the development of such a middleware tool to automatically and dynamically annotate web-pages with additional context information present within the page, and preview information present within hypertext link destinations found on the page.

Who are the users of a cross-language retrieval system? Under what circumstances do they need to perform such multi-language searches? How will the task and the context of use affect successful interaction with the system? Answers to these questions were explored in a user study performed as part of the design stages of Clarity, a EU founded project on cross-language information retrieval. The findings resulted in a rethink of the planned user interface and a consequent expansion of the set of services offered. This paper reports on the methodology and techniques used for the elicitation of user requirements as well as how these were in turn transformed into new design solutions.

The following paper describes a set of methods that is currently used in a study of the task performance process of patent engineers within the Swedish Patent- and Registration Office (SPRO) 1. The focus of the study is to investigate the relationship between the user’s work-task and the information seeking and retrieval process. The study is performed within a real life work setting where patent engineers are performing real work tasks involving real information needs. This paper will focus on and describe a set of data collection methods used in our study. Generally, IR studies are performed within a controlled laboratory environment with controlled variables and design or simulated information need. We argue that we need to take a broader perspective on the information seeking and retrieval in order to understand the task performance process and elicit requirements for information systems design.