This paper introduces a novel user interface that integrates search and browsing of very large category hierarchies with their associated text collections. A key component is the separate but simultaneous display of the representations of the categories and the retrieved documents. Another key component is the display ofmultiple selected categories simultaneously, complete with their hierarchical context. The prototype implementation uses animation and a three-dimensional graphical workspace to accommodate the category hierarchy and to store intermediate search results. Query specification in this 3D environment is accomplished via a novel method for painting Boolean queries over a combination of category labels and free text. Examples are shown on a collection of medical text.

Although search over World Wide Web pages has recently received much academic and commercial attention, surprisingly little research has been done on how to search the web pages within large, diverse intranets. Intranets contain the information associated with the internal workings of an organization. A standard search engine retrieves web pages that fall within a widely diverse range of information contexts, but presents these results uniformly, in a ranked list. As an alternative, the Cha-Cha system organizes web search results in such a way as to reflect the underlying structure of the intranet. In our approach, an “outline ” or “table of contents ” is created by first recording the shortest paths in hyperlinks from root pages to every page within the web intranet. After the user issues a query, these shortest paths are dynamically combined to form a hierarchical outline of the context in which the search results occur. The system is designed to be helpful for users with a wide range of computer skills. Preliminary user study and survey results suggest that some users find the resulting structure more helpful than the standard retrieval results display for intranet search. 1

We have developed an in6 vative searchin terface that allowsnAOz5z ert users to move through large in97z86 tion spacesin a flexible manle without feelin lost. The design goal was to o#er users a "browsin the shelves" experien5 seamlessly in tegrated with focused search. Key to achievin our goal is the explicit exposure of hierarchical faceted metadatain a manz6 that is in tuitive an in vitin to users. After several iteration of design an testinA the usability results are strikinA] positive. We believe our approach marks a major step forward in search userin terfacesan can serve as a model for web-based collection of up to 100,000 items.

Abstract. As current digital libraries are becoming more complex, the facilities provided by them will increase and the difficulty of learning associated with the complexity of using these facilities will also increase. In order to produce usable and useful interactive systems, designers need to ensure that good design features are incorporated into the systems, taking into consideration end-users' needs and cultural backgrounds. We carried out a study to investigate useful design features digital libraries should have. The study provides insights on the usability impact of digital libraries for task completion and end-users ' perceived impressions on the effectiveness of the digital libraries. The results also suggest that there is little provision on the interface to cater to end-users ' browsing and inter-cultural needs. Hence, this paper also discusses design guidelines for the design of user-centred digital libraries. 1

Abstract. An important problem for information access systems is that of organizing large sets of documents that have been retrieved in response to a query. Text categorization and text clustering are two natural language processing tasks whose results can be applied to document organization. This chapter describes user interfaces that use categories and clusters to organize retrieval results, and examines the relationship between the two. 1 1.

The promises of network-accessible information are increasingly difficult to achieve. These difficulties are due to a variety of causes, such as, the rapid growth in the volume of network-available information and the increasing complexity, diversity and terminological fluctuations of the different information sources available. This paper presents a conceptual architecture for the organisation information space across collections of component systems in multi-databases that provides serendipity, exploration and contextualisation support so that users can achieve logical connections between concepts they are familiar with and schema terms employed in multi-database systems. Large-scale searching for multi-database schema information is guided by a combination of lexical, structural and semantic aspects of schema terms in order to reveal more meaning both about the contents of a requested information term and about its placement within the distributed information space. 1

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Searching the internet using the currently available search engines is not satisfactory. The techniques used there focus on the extraction of relevant information directly from the documents available on the web. We introduce a new approach, which aims at describing the content of a webspace, formed by a collection of related documents, instead of looking at the single documents. By identifying concepts and the relationships among them, the content of a webspace is described semantically in a schema for the webspace. The main objective is that by following this approach we can start querying the content of a collection of related documents rather than the content of a single document. In this paper we introduce a model for the webspace that allows us to describe the concepts at a semantical level, in terms of classes, associations over classes, and attributes of classes. At the syntactical level we use XML, to describe information as instantiations of the concepts defined in the websp...

This paper presents a methodology for the enhancement of a hypertext version of a textbook. The enhancement over the textual version of the textbook is achieved by automatically inserting links between text excerpt of the textbook and item in the subject index produced by the author of the textbook. These links enable accessing parts of the textbook that have not been speci cally indexed by the author, but that are semantically related to items in the subject index. Such links are meant to improve the e ectiveness of the use of the book in search oriented tasks. 1

Searching information from a large and dynamic information space causes several problems, concerning, for instance, dynamic and vague information needs, too broad queries, and correctness and sensibility of descriptors. These problems may be attacked by navigational query formulation strategies which are available for stratied architectures. However, stratied architectures cannot be easily constructed for large and dynamic information spaces. In this article, we show how navigational query formulation and exploration can be employed on the WWW by using linguistic (as opposed to statistical) renements. Grounded in the theory of navigational networks for index expressions, we introduce our tool, the INdex Navigator (INN), for searching and navigating the WWW. The INN is a dynamic retrieval and exploration system for the WWW. Keywords: Information Retrieval, Hypertext, Query by Navigation, World Wide Web, Index Expressions. 1 Introduction Searching information from a lar...