Information Browsing Research Articles

“SEARCH” VS. “BROWSE”: A THEORY OF ERROR GROUNDED IN RADICAL (NOT RATIONAL) IGNORANCE

Economists tend to view ignorance as “rational,” neglecting the possibility that ignorance is unintentional. This oversight is reflected in economists’ model of “information search,” which can be fruitfully contrasted with “information browsing.” Information searches are designed to discover unknown knowns, whose value is calculable ex ante, such that this value justifies the cost of the search. In this model of human information acquisition, there is no primal or “radical” ignorance that might prevent people from knowing which information to look for, lacking omniscience. Unlike ignorance that is rationally chosen on the basis of an accurate cost/benefit calculation, radical ignorance can explain human error. An account of error as grounded in radical ignorance bypasses the need to appeal to irrationality in order to explain economic (and other) mistakes.

Eye-based Human Computer Interaction Allowing Phoning, Reading E-Book/E-Comic/E-Learning, Internet Browsing, and TV Information Extraction

Eye-based Human-Computer Interaction: HCI system which allows phoning, reading e-book/e-comic/e-learning, internet browsing, and TV information extraction is proposed for handicap student in E-Learning Application. The conventional eye-based HCI applications are facing problems on accuracy and process speed. We develop new interfaces for improving key-in accuracy and process speed of eye-based key-in for E-Learning application, in particular. We propose eye-based HCI by utilizing camera mounted glasses for gaze estimation. We use the sight for controlling the user interface such as navigation of e-comic/e-book/e-learning contents, phoning, internet browsing, and TV information extraction. We develop interfaces including standard interface navigator with five keys, single line of moving keyboard, and multi line of moving keyboard in order to allow the aforementioned functions without burdening the accuracy. The experimental results show the proposed system does work the aforementioned functions in a real time basis.

Searching and Browsing Linked Data with SWSE: The Semantic Web Search Engine

In this paper, we discuss the architecture and implementation of the Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE). Following traditional search engine architecture, SWSE consists of crawling, data enhancing, indexing and a user interface for search, browsing and retrieval of information; unlike traditional search engines, SWSE operates over RDF Web data -- loosely also known as Linked Data -- which implies unique challenges for the system design, architecture, algorithms, implementation and user interface. In particular, many challenges exist in adopting Semantic Web technologies for Web data: the unique challenges of the Web -- in terms of scale, unreliability, inconsistency and noise -- are largely overlooked by the current Semantic Web standards. Herein, we describe the current SWSE system, initially detailing the architecture and later elaborating upon the function, design, implementation and performance of each individual component. In so doing, we also give an insight into how current Semantic Web standards can be tailored, in a besteffort manner, for use on Web data. Throughout, we offer evaluation and complementary argumentation to support our design choices, and also offer discussion on future directions and open research questions. Later, we also provide candid discussion relating to the difficulties currently faced in bringing such a search engine into the mainstream, and lessons learnt from roughly six years working on the Semantic Web Search Engine project.

Modularized multimedia framework for multi-modal and multi-functional interactions

Smart Architectural Surface is a novel and highly integrated planar construct for diversified smart home services with networked smart cell units equipped with various sensing, cognition and actuation capabilities that would allow run-time polymorphism as the basis for functional changes for various event-driven operation scenarios. The SAS system can demonstrate the outcomes of collective intelligence that are mediated by various multi-modal interactions. Current SAS prototype is capable of polymorphous functional changes for dynamically adjustable electronic wallpaper, location/distance-aware video conferencing, personalized information browser, and automatic responses to various unintended events. Future applications would harness machine learning and machine vision techniques and will explore the advantages of having computational ecology of its digital modular units constituting smart wall system for multi-modal and multi-functional interactions.

NCSA Mosaic: a global hypermedia system

PurposeThis paper seeks to report on an Internet‐based system for hypermedia information discovery and retrieval and wide‐area distributed asynchronous collaboration designed and built at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).Design/methodology/approachThe NCSA is developing Mosaic clients – user‐friendly information browsers – for the three most popular desktop computing environments of the mid‐1990s: the Unix‐based X Window System, the Apple Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows 3.1. This paper primarily discusses the X client, as it has the most advanced functionality of the three at this time.FindingsThe system, called NCSA Mosaic, integrates cleanly into existing Internet protocols, formats, data sources, and environments, and provides powerful new capabilities for using and sharing information across the Internet.Originality/valueNCSA is making the complete Mosaic system freely available and distributable for all academic and research organizations and purposes.

Prioritization of Domain-Specific Web Information Extraction

It is often desirable to extract structured information from raw web pages for better information browsing, query answering, and pattern mining. many such Information Extraction (IE) technologies are costly and applying them at the web-scale is impractical. In this paper, we propose a novel prioritization approach where candidate pages from the corpus are ordered according to their expected contribution to the extraction results and those with higher estimated potential are extracted earlier. Systems employing this approach can stop the extraction process at any time when the resource gets scarce (i.e., not all pages in the corpus can be processed), without worrying about wasting extraction effort on unimportant pages. More specifically, we define a novel notion to measure the value of extraction results and design various mechanisms for estimating a candidate page’s contribution to this value. We further design and build the Extraction Prioritization (EP) system with efficient scoring and scheduling algorithms, and experimentally demonstrate that EP significantly outperforms the naive approach and is more flexible than the classifier approach.

Generic title labeling for clustered documents

Document clustering is a powerful technique to detect topics and their relations for information browsing, analysis, and organization. However, clustered documents require post-assignment of descriptive titles to help users interpret the results. Existing techniques often assign labels to clusters based only on the terms that the clustered documents contain, which may not be sufficient for some applications. To solve this problem, a cluster labeling algorithm for creating generic titles, based on external resources such as WordNet, is proposed. Our method first extracts category-specific terms as cluster descriptors. These descriptors are then mapped to generic terms based on a hypernym search algorithm. The proposed method has been evaluated on a patent document collection and a subset of the Reuters-21578 collection. Experimental results revealed that our method performs as anticipated. Real-case applications of these generic terms show promising in assisting humans in interpreting the clustered topics. Our method is general enough such that it can be easily extended to use other hierarchical resources for adaptable label generation.

Discovering Event Evolution Graphs From News Corpora

Given the advance of Internet technologies, we can now easily extract hundreds or thousands of news stories of any ongoing incidents from newswires such as CNN.com, but the volume of information is too large for us to capture the blueprint. Information retrieval techniques such as topic detection and tracking are able to organize news stories as events, in a flat hierarchical structure, within a topic. However, they are incapable of presenting the complex evolution relationships between the events. We are interested to learn not only what the major events are but also how they develop within the topic. It is beneficial to identify the seminal events, the intermediary and ending events, and the evolution of these events. In this paper, we propose to utilize the event timestamp, event content similarity, temporal proximity, and document distributional proximity to model the event evolution relationships between events in an incident. An event evolution graph is constructed to present the underlying structure of events for efficient browsing and extracting of information. Case study and experiments are presented to illustrate and show the performance of our proposed technique. It is found that our proposed technique outperforms the baseline technique and other comparable techniques in previous work.

An XML-based implementation of manufacturing route sheet documents for context-sensitive and web-based process planning

Web-based process planning is an internet application for distributed and knowledge-sharing process planning providing important support for virtual enterprises. Route sheet documents are widely adopted as user interfaces for information input, output, browsing, sharing and integration. In traditional applications, data and their presentation in specially formatted route sheet documents are implemented together. Separation of data and their presentation is emphasized in this paper because not only can it provide multi-level and multi-orientation views of the same data, but it can also improve context-sensitivity in process planning by better information sharing. An eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based method for route sheet presentation and implementation is proposed to support context-sensitive and web-based process planning. The route sheet document includes a declarative user interface, a tree-style data structure, and processing rules embedded in documents to support context-sensitive information processing. An XML application named Manufacturing Process XML (MPXML) was developed as a meta-language for description of manufacturing process information.

The generation of faceted classification schemes for use in the organisation of engineering design documents

Vast quantities of electronic information are generated and stored such that engineers may later retrieve, assimilate and ultimately utilise such information during their daily activities. Where term-based querying relies upon suitable query formulation, browsing of pre-organised information allows the information to be displayed against a descriptive structure. Traditional classification schemes generally cater for certain viewpoints, however faceted schemes concurrently describe multiple perspectives. The literature specifying the creation of such schemata is sparse, and distributed across different domains and eras. This paper reviews this literature and proposes a means by which the underlying theory may be more readily applied within engineering design.

Structuring low-quality videotaped lectures for cross-reference browsing by video text analysis

This paper presents an unified approach in analyzing and structuring the content of videotaped lectures for distance learning applications. By structuring lecture videos, we can support topic indexing and semantic querying of multimedia documents captured in the traditional classrooms. Our goal in this paper is to automatically construct the cross references of lecture videos and textual documents so as to facilitate the synchronized browsing and presentation of multimedia information. The major issues involved in our approach are topical event detection, video text analysis and the matching of slide shots and external documents. In topical event detection, a novel transition detector is proposed to rapidly locate the slide shot boundaries by computing the changes of text and background regions in videos. For each detected topical event, multiple keyframes are extracted for video text detection, super-resolution reconstruction, binarization and recognition. A new approach for the reconstruction of high-resolution textboxes based on linear interpolation and multi-frame integration is also proposed for the effective binarization and recognition. The recognized characters are utilized to match the video slide shots and external documents based on our proposed title and content similarity measures.

Mobile information access

It is likely that mobile phones will soon come to rival more traditional devices as the primary platform for information access. Consequently, it is important to understand the emerging information access behavior of mobile Internet (MI) users especially in relation to their use of mobile handsets for information browsing and query-based search. In this article, we describe the results of a recent analysis of the MI habits of more than 600,000 European MI users, with a particular emphasis on the emerging interest in mobile search. We consider a range of factors including whether there are key differences between browsing and search behavior on the MI compared to the Web. We highlight how browsing continues to dominate mobile information access, but go on to show how search is becoming an increasingly popular information access alternative especially in relation to certain types of mobile handsets and information needs. Moreover, we show that sessions involving search tend to be longer and more data-rich than those that do not involve search. We also look at the type of queries used during mobile search and the way that these queries tend to be modified during the course of a mobile search session. Finally we examine the overlap among mobile search queries and the different topics mobile users are interested in.

ADAPTIVE INFORMATION ACCESS: PERSONALIZATION AND PRIVACY

As online information continues to grow at an exponential rate our ability to access this information effectively does not, and users are often frustrated by how difficult it is to locate the right information quickly and easily. So-called personalization technology is a potential solution to this information overload problem: by automatically learning about the needs and preferences of users, personalized information access solutions have the potential to offer users a more proactive and intelligent form of information access that is sensitive to their long-term preferences and current needs. In this paper, we document two case-studies of the use of personalization techniques to support information browsing and search. In addition, we consider the inevitable privacy issues that go hand-in-hand with profiling and personalization techniques and highlight the importance of striking the right balance between privacy and personalization when it comes to the development and deployment of practical systems.

Dynamic Query Optimization Approach for Semantic Database Grid

Fundamentally, semantic grid database is about bringing globally distributed databases together in order to coordinate resource sharing and problem solving in which information is given well-defined meaning, and DartGrid II is the implemented database gird system whose goal is to provide a semantic solution for integrating database resources on the Web. Although many algorithms have been proposed for optimizing query-processing in order to minimize costs and/or response time, associated with obtaining the answer to query in a distributed database system, database grid query optimization problem is fundamentally different from traditional distributed query optimization. These differences are shown to be the consequences of autonomy and heterogeneity of database nodes in database grid. Therefore, more challenges have arisen for query optimization in database grid than traditional distributed database. Following this observation, the design of a query optimizer in DartGrid II is presented, and a heuristic, dynamic and parallel query optimization approach to processing query in database grid is proposed. A set of semantic tools supporting relational database integration and semantic-based information browsing has also been implemented to realize the above vision.

Interfaz visual para recuperación de información basada en análisis de metadatos, escalamiento multidimensional y efecto ojo de pez

This paper proposes an original model of the visual information retrieval interface (VIRI), aimed at websites described by metadata. The paper also describes the development of an experimental prototype based on the proposed model. The applied methodology for the prototype's development is a combination of three methods: Metadata mining, Multidimensional scaling (MDS), and a Focus+Context technique called Fisheye. Finally, a user test is conducted, whose results suggest that the proposed model of VIRI is useful for information browsing and retrieval, and is satisfying for the end-user as well.

Supporting non-English Web searching: An experiment on the Spanish business and the Arabic medical intelligence portals

Although non-English-speaking online populations are growing rapidly, support for searching non-English Web content is much weaker than for English content. Prior research has implicitly assumed English to be the primary language used on the Web, but this is not the case for many non-English-speaking regions. This research proposes a language-independent approach that uses meta-searching, statistical language processing, summarization, categorization, and visualization techniques to build high-quality domain-specific collections and to support searching and browsing of non-English information. Based on this approach, we developed SBizPort and AMedPort for the Spanish business and Arabic medical domains respectively. Experimental results showed that the portals achieved significantly better search accuracy, information quality, and overall satisfaction than benchmark search engines. Subjects strongly favored the portals' search and browse functionality and user interface. This research thus contributes to developing and validating a useful approach to non-English Web searching and providing an example of supporting decision-making in non-English Web domains.

A Review of Research on Information Seeking Behaviour of Agricultural Scientists: International Perspectives

Information seeking behaviour is an essential component in the designing and developing of need based information centres for meeting the information requirements of users. The undertaken study is an output of doctorate research in which a comprehensive review research scanned in international context in the field of agricultural sciences. The study covers various facets related to information seeking behaviour, findings and their conceptual meanings. It includes about sixty five researches undertaken by foreign researchers in the agriculture sector. The findings of the studies are organised into various categories i.e., theories of information seeking; information needs; users characteristics; information browsing; information seeking; and information seeking behaviour. http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dbit.26.2.3677

An information browsing system using a Java-based cellular phone in a remote display environment

In this paper, we design and implement an information browsing system by using a Java-based cellular phone in the remote display environment that we have proposed. In this system, an application on a remote display displays various information for users, and a Java application on a cellular phone displays operational pages for users to operate the application on the remote display. Users can browse information on the remote display by operating the corresponding operational pages on the cellular phone. Both applications run according to their schedules that specify the behaviors and their execution times. In addition, the Java application personalizes operational pages based on the user's personal information. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 37(10): 1–12, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.20562

NPInter: the noncoding RNAs and protein related biomacromolecules interaction database

The noncoding RNAs and protein related biomacromolecules interaction database (NPInter; or ) is a database that documents experimentally determined functional interactions between noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) and protein related biomacromolecules (PRMs) (proteins, mRNAs or genomic DNAs). NPInter intends to provide the scientific community with a comprehensive and integrated tool for efficient browsing and extraction of information on interactions between ncRNAs and PRMs. Beyond cataloguing details of these interactions, the NPInter will be useful for understanding ncRNA function, as it adds a very important functional element, ncRNAs, to the biomolecule interaction network and sets up a bridge between the coding and the noncoding kingdoms.

MULTILINGUAL, ONTOLOGY-DRIVEN, CONTENT-BASED SEARCH AND NAVIGATION OF INFORMATION ITEMS

ABSTRACT The provision of valuable information services to communities within an organization is an important matter that has been discussed thoroughly in numerous published articles. It is commonly agreed that information services, in conjunction with information retrieval with increased precision and recall, must provide integrated navigation and search facilities, supported by advanced ontology-driven services and lexical resources. This paper presents the Multilingual Information Browsing and Search system that enables users to search for information in an ontology-driven and content-based way, supported by lexical resources and the reasoning services of description logics. The system supports users browsing the conceptual system underlying the information service seamlessly to search and navigate the annotated information items. The paper gives special emphasis to the ontological commitments and to the exploitation of ontologies for the provision of services.