Spatial Hypertext for Digital Library Users
George Buchanan, Ann Blandford, Matt Jones, Harold Thimbleby
Interaction Design CentreMiddlesex University
London
History Lessons
• Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat its mistakes
Economics• Users don’t want to do any extra work
– however, they are happy to get extra benefits “for free”
– e.g. Amazon’s customer profiling
Information Seeking
• Wider process than “vanilla” Information Retrieval– Information need formulation– Search formulation– “IR”– Document review and selection– Information need reformulation
• Highly iterative / Internally complex
Spatial Hypertext• Direct manipulation• Document shown as a graphical item • Uses visual cues (e.g. colour. shape) to
suggest a document’s role, type, age...• Articulates uncertain and/or provisional
nature of document groupings• Documents can be grouped
– By proximity etc. or by hierarchy
Spatial Hypertext “State of Play”
• Positive outcomes to user studies– For supporting decision argumentation– For supporting information triage
• Often loosely (if at all) connected to information systems– Search behaviours are poorly defined– Hard versus soft behaviours not well
understood
Spatial Parsing
• Introduced by Shipman in 1995• Not a lexical parser• Lexical = fixed syntax->extract words
from a stream->find semantics• Spatial = unknown syntax->extract
patterns from a space->process patterns to find semantics
Garnet
• Spatial Hypertext for Digital Libraries• Connects to the Greenstone DL using
the Greenstone/CORBA protocol• Similar to VIKI
GarnetSpatial Parsing
• Currently has a simple (proximity) spatial parser
• Connects to a clustering system– Gives a cluster profile for every pattern
found– Incoherent patterns are ignored– Small patterns are ignored
• Double-click on label = open in browser
GarnetSpatial Parsing
• A search result can be “scattered”– Placing search result labels next to groups of
similar documents– A document may appear next to no, one or
many groups– Search result list appears as usual
• Using user organisation of material to predict the role of future candidate documents
Garnet - Search
• You can drag from search results to workspace
• Items can be deleted from search results
• Keeps a history
Garnet - User Issues
• Common metaphors seem inconsistent– e.g. “deleting” a document; blacklisting
versus returning• User control versus automatic action• Scattering
– Is it useful? Is the quality right?– representation of certainty– positioning
Conclusion
• A lot of work to be done• Far more questions than answers• User evaluation needed• Speed/space concerns with spatial
parser