| What Would 'Google' Do? Users' Mental Models of a Digital Library Search Engine | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 1-12 | |
| Michael Khoo; Catherine Hall | |||
| A mental model is a model that people have of themselves, others, the
environment, and the things with which they interact, such as technologies.
Mental models can support the user-centered development of digital libraries:
if we can understand how users perceive digital libraries, we can design
interfaces that take these perceptions into account. In this paper, we describe
a novel method for eliciting a generic mental model from users, in this case of
a digital library's search engine. The method is based on a content analysis of
users' mental representations of the system's usability, which they generated
in heuristic evaluations. The content analysis elicited features that the
evaluators thought important for the search engine. The resulting mental model
represents a generic model of the search engine, rather than a clustering of
individuals' mental models of the same search engine. The model includes a
number of references to Web search engines as ideal models, but these
references are idealistic rather than realistic. We conclude that users' mental
models of Web search engines should not be taken at face value. The
implications of this finding for digital library development and design are
discussed. Keywords: human-computer interaction; human factors; mental models; search; search
engine; users; user-centered design | |||
| An Exploration of ebook Selection Behavior in Academic Library Collections | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 13-24 | |
| Dana McKay; Annika Hinze; Ralf Heese; Nicholas Vanderschantz; Claire Timpany; Sally Jo Cunningham | |||
| Academic libraries have offered ebooks for some time, however little is
known about how readers interact with them while making relevance decisions. In
this paper we seek to address that gap by analyzing ebook transaction logs for
books in a university library. Keywords: ebooks; log analysis; book selection; HCI; information behavior | |||
| Information Seekers' Visual Focus during Time Constraint Document Triage | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 25-31 | |
| Fernando Loizides | |||
| Time-constraints are a commonly accepted limitation to a user's information
seeking process. Physical time constraints can cause users to have a low
tolerance of time consuming information seeking tasks. This paper examines the
effects of time constraints on the document triage process in an eye-tracked
lab-based study. The visual attention of three time constraints are reported
on. Similarities and differences to previous triage data are also reported on,
contributing to an ongoing research investigation of the general document
triage process. Keywords: Document Triage; Information Seeking; Relevance Decisions | |||
| Which Words Do You Remember? Temporal Properties of Language Use in Digital Archives | | BIBA | Full-Text | 32-37 | |
| Nina Tahmasebi; Gerhard Gossen; Thomas Risse | |||
| Knowing the behavior of terms in written texts can help us tailor fit models, algorithms and resources to improve access to digital libraries and help us answer information needs in longer spanning archives. In this paper we investigate the behavior of English written text in blogs in comparison to traditional texts from the New York Times, The Times Archive, and the British National Corpus. We show that user generated content, similar to spoken content, differs in characteristics from 'professionally' written text and experiences a more dynamic behavior. | |||
| Toward Mobile-Friendly Libraries: The Status Quo | | BIBA | Full-Text | 38-50 | |
| Dongwon Lee | |||
| As the number of users accessing web sites from their mobile devices rapidly increases, it becomes increasingly important for libraries to make their homepages "mobile-friendly." However, to our best knowledge, there has been little attempt to survey how ready existing libraries are towards this upcoming mobile era and to quantitatively analyze the findings via data exploration methods. In this paper, using the W3C's tool, mobileOK, we characterize the mobile-friendliness of comprehensive set of more than 400 libraries with respect to locations (e.g., world-wide vs. US vs. EU) and types (e.g., desktop vs. mobile). Based on our findings, we conclude that majority of current libraries (regardless of locations and types) be not mobile-friendly at all (with low mobile-friendliness scores of 0.16-0.21). Using mobilization tools, in addition, we demonstrate that the mobile-friendliness of library homepages can be improved significantly (i.e., 67%-82%). As such, much more efforts to make library homepages more mobile-friendly are greatly needed. | |||
| Listen to Tipple: Creating a Mobile Digital Library with Location-Triggered Audio Books | | BIBA | Full-Text | 51-56 | |
| Annika Hinze; David Bainbridge | |||
| This paper explores the role of audio as a means to access ebooks while the user is at the locations that are referred to in the books. The books are sourced from a digital library and can either be accompanied by pre-recorded audio or synthesized using text-to-speech. The paper discusses the implications of audio access for ebook with particular reference to HCI challenges. | |||
| Re-finding Physical Documents: Extending a Digital Library into a Human-Centred Workplace | | BIBA | Full-Text | 57-63 | |
| Annika Hinze; Amay Dighe | |||
| It is often difficult for busy people to keep track of or re-find documents in their own workplace. Very few methods have been developed for finding a physical object's location in an office. Most of the existing methods require that some kind of structured approach be followed by the user. We created a "Human-Centred Workplace" system that does not require orderly users. The system embeds passive tags in documents and uses cameras in the office to track changes in the documents' locations. This paper introduces the design and implementation of the system, explores its use in an office environment and gives a initial evaluation of our prototypical implementation. | |||
| User Needs for Enhanced Engagement with Cultural Heritage Collections | | BIBA | Full-Text | 64-75 | |
| Mark S. Sweetnam; Maristella Agosti; Nicola Orio; Chiara Ponchia; Christina M. Steiner; Eva-Catherine Hillemann; Micheál Ó Siochrú; Séamus Lawless | |||
| This paper presents research carried out in order to elicit user needs for the design and development of a digital library and research platform intended to enhance user engagement with cultural heritage collections. It outlines a range of user constituencies for this digital library. The paper outlines a taxonomy of intended users for this system and describes in detail the characteristics and requirements of these users for the facilitation and enhancement of their engagement with and use of textual and visual cultural artefacts. | |||
| Digital Library Sustainability and Design Processes | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 76-88 | |
| Anne Adams; Pauline Ngimwa | |||
| This paper highlights the importance of sustainability in digital library
design processes and frames these arguments within current digital library
forums and literature. Sustainability of digital libraries is analysed through
an empirical study of 10 best practice digital library projects across three
African countries (Uganda, South Africa, Kenya). Through a retrospective review
of the projects design processes the paper focuses on the role of technologies
/ platforms (bespoke, open source, proprietary, web 2 and mobile) in
sustainability of these systems. In-depth interviews from 38 stakeholders were
triangulated against a documentary analysis and observational data and the
findings integrated through a grounded theory analysis. The results identify
the importance of flexibility in technologies that enable customization of
educational digital resources to meet specific institutional and subject
discipline needs. Comparative Evidence is presented that highlights poor
sustainability when inflexible systems do not consider scalability or
maintenance issues. Keywords: Sustainability; design processes; flexibility; African HE; case studies | |||
| Creation of Textual Versions of Historical Documents from Polish Digital Libraries | | BIBA | Full-Text | 89-94 | |
| Adam Dudczak; Milosz Kmieciak; Marcin Werla | |||
| This paper describes the results of initial work aimed at increasing the number and improving the quality of textual versions of the historical documents available in Polish digital libraries. Digital libraries community is missing tools that integrate existing digitisation workflow with customizable OCR engine and crowd-based text correction, this paper describes work on providing such a solution. Apart from today's state of the art in this field, this paper includes a description of the Virtual Transcription Laboratory (VTL) prototype, a crowdsourcing platform that utilize the Tesseract OCR engine. The last chapter outlines results of the prototype's evaluation on real life dataset of historical documents from the IMPACT project. Results prove the applicability of the proposed solution as an enhancement of the digitisation workflow. | |||
| Increasing Recall for Text Re-use in Historical Documents to Support Research in the Humanities | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 95-100 | |
| Marco Büchler; Gregory Crane; Maria Moritz; Alison Babeu | |||
| High precision text re-use detection allows humanists to discover where and
how particular authors are quoted (e.g., the different sections of Plato's work
that come in and out of vogue). This paper reports on on-going work to provide
the high recall text re-use detection that humanists often demand. Using an
edition of one Greek work that marked quotations and paraphrases from the
Homeric epics as our testbed, we were able to achieve a recall of at least 94%
while maintaining a precision of 73%. This particular study is part of a larger
effort to detect text re-use across 15 million words of Greek and 10 million
words of Latin available or under development as openly licensed TEI XML. Keywords: historical text re-use; hypertextuality; Homer; Athenaeus | |||
| PrEV: Preservation Explorer and Vault for Web 2.0 User-Generated Content | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 101-112 | |
| Anqi Cui; Liner Yang; Dejun Hou; Min-Yen Kan; Yiqun Liu; Min Zhang; Shaoping Ma | |||
| We present the Preservation Explorer and Vault (PrEV) system, a city-centric
multilingual digital library that archives and makes available Web 2.0
resources, and aims to store a comprehensive record of what urban lifestyle is
like. To match the current state of the digital environment, a key
architectural design choice in PrEV is to archive not only Web 1.0 web pages,
but also Web 2.0 multilingual resources that include multimedia, real-time
microblog content, as well as mobile application descriptions (e.g., iPhone
app) in a collaborative manner. PrEV performs the preservation of such
resources for posterity, and makes them available for programmatic retrieval by
third party agents, and for exploration by scholars with its user interface. Keywords: Preservation; Archive Visualization; API; Web 2.0; User-Generated Content;
NExT; PrEV | |||
| Preserving Scientific Processes from Design to Publications | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 113-124 | |
| Rudolf Mayer; Andreas Rauber; Martin Alexander Neumann; John Thomson; Gonçalo Antunes | |||
| Digital Preservation has so far focused mainly on digital objects that are
static in their nature, such as text and multimedia documents. However, there
is an increasing demand to extend the applications towards dynamic objects and
whole processes, such as scientific workflows in the domain of E-Science. This
calls for a revision and extension of current concepts, methods and practices.
Important questions to address are e.g. what needs to be captured at ingest,
how do the digital objects need to be described, which preservation actions are
applicable and how can the preserved objects be evaluated. In this paper we
present a conceptual model for capturing the required information and show how
this can be linked to evaluating the re-invocation of a preserved process. Keywords: Digital Preservation; Context | |||
| Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost? | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 125-137 | |
| Hany SalahEldeen; Michael L. Nelson | |||
| Social media content has grown exponentially in the recent years and the
role of social media has evolved from just narrating life events to actually
shaping them. In this paper we explore how many resources shared in social
media are still available on the live web or in public web archives. By
analyzing six different event-centric datasets of resources shared in social
media in the period from June 2009 to March 2012, we found about 11% lost and
20% archived after just a year and an average of 27% lost and 41% archived
after two and a half years. Furthermore, we found a nearly linear relationship
between time of sharing of the resource and the percentage lost, with a
slightly less linear relationship between time of sharing and archiving
coverage of the resource. From this model we conclude that after the first year
of publishing, nearly 11% of shared resources will be lost and after that we
will continue to lose 0.02% per day. Keywords: Web Archiving; Social Media; Digital Preservation | |||
| Automatic Vandalism Detection in Wikipedia with Active Associative Classification | | BIBA | Full-Text | 138-143 | |
| Maria Sumbana; Marcos André Gonçalves; Rodrigo Silva Oliveira; Jussara M. Almeida; Adriano Veloso | |||
| Wikipedia and other free editing services for collaboratively generated content have quickly grown in popularity. However, the lack of editing control has made these services vulnerable to various types of malicious actions such as vandalism. State-of-the-art vandalism detection methods are based on supervised techniques, thus relying on the availability of large and representative training collections. Building such collections, often with the help of crowdsourcing, is very costly due to a natural skew towards very few vandalism examples in the available data as well as dynamic patterns. Aiming at reducing the cost of building such collections, we present a new active sampling technique coupled with an on-demand associative classification algorithm for Wikipedia vandalism detection. We show that our classifier enhanced with a simple undersampling technique for building the training set outperforms state-of-the-art classifiers such as SVMs and kNNs. Furthermore, by applying active sampling, we are able to reduce the need for training in almost 96% with only a small impact on detection results. | |||
| Applying Digital Library Technologies to Nuclear Forensics | | BIBA | Full-Text | 144-149 | |
| Electra Sutton; Chloe Reynolds; Fredric C. Gey; Ray R. Larson | |||
| Digital Libraries will enhance the value of forensic endeavors if they provide tools that enable data mining capabilities. In fact, collecting data without such tools can result in investigators becoming overwhelmed. Currently, the quantity of highly dangerous radioactive materials is increasing with the advancement of civilizations' scientific inventions. This creates a demand for an equivalently sophisticated forensics capability that prevents misuse and brings malicious intent to justice. Our forensics approach applies digital library and data mining techniques. Specifically, the forensic investigator will utilize our digital library system which has been enhanced with advanced data mining query tools in order to determine attribution of material to their geographic sources and threat levels, enabling tracing and rating of smuggling activities. | |||
| Identifying References to Datasets in Publications | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 150-161 | |
| Katarina Boland; Dominique Ritze; Kai Eckert; Brigitte Mathiak | |||
| Research data and publications are usually stored in separate and
structurally distinct information systems. Often, links between these resources
are not explicitly available which complicates the search for previous
research. In this paper, we propose a pattern induction method for the
detection of study references in full texts. Since these references are not
specified in a standardized way and may occur inside a variety of different
contexts -- i.e., captions, footnotes, or continuous text -- our algorithm is
required to induce very flexible patterns. To overcome the sparse distribution
of training instances, we induce patterns iteratively using a bootstrapping
approach. We show that our method achieves promising results for the automatic
identification of data references and is a first step towards building an
integrated information system. Keywords: Digital Libraries; Information Extraction; Recognition of Dataset
References; Iterative Pattern Induction; Bootstrapping | |||
| Collaborative Tagging of Art Digital Libraries: Who Should Be Tagging? -- A Case Study | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 162-172 | |
| M. Mahoui; C. Boston-Clay; R. Stein; N. Tirupattur | |||
| Collaborative tagging is attracting a growing community in the arts museums
as manifested by several initiatives such as the Steve Museum project and the
Posse initiative at the Brooklyn Museum. The driving force for these projects
is the quest for increased and improved access to artifact collections such as
art collections. Previous results of studying the nature of tags provided by
users reveal that these tags have little overlap with museum documentation; but
on the other hand, there is good overlapping with terms from vocabulary sources
such as the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT). This paper reports a case
study that we performed where the aim was to include tags provided by "average"
users from the broader community, not necessarily closely related to the art
field as it was the focus of the previous studies. The study we performed
comparing tags generated by average users, expert users and metadata seems to
indicate the unique role that tags provided by average users would play in
facilitating the interaction with art digital libraries. Keywords: User tags; annotation; art digital libraries; metadata; comparative study | |||
| A System for Exposing Linguistic Linked Open Data | | BIBA | Full-Text | 173-178 | |
| Emanuele Di Buccio; Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio; Gianmaria Silvello | |||
| In this paper we introduce the Atlante Sintattico d'Italia, Syntactic Atlas of Italy (ASIt) enterprise which is a linguistic project aiming to account for minimally different variants within a sample of closely related languages. One of the main goals of ASIt is to share and make linguistic data re-usable. In order to create a universally available resource and be compliant with other relevant linguistic projects, we define a Resource Description Framework (RDF) model for the ASIt linguistic data thus providing an instrument to expose these data as Linked Open Data (LOD). By exploiting RDF native capabilities we overcome the ASIt methodological and technical peculiarities and enable different linguistic projects to read, manipulate and re-use linguistic data. | |||
| Linking the Parliamentary Record: A New Approach to Metadata for Legislative Proceedings | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 179-184 | |
| Richard Gartner | |||
| This paper discusses an on-going project which aims to develop an XML
architecture for linking Parliamentary and other legislative proceedings. The
project has developed a schema which allows key components of the record to be
linked semantically and a set of controlled vocabularies to support these
linkages. The project will convert two collections of proceedings to the schema
and develop a prototype web-based union catalogue for them. Keywords: metadata; Parliamentary proceedings; XML; controlled vocabularies | |||
| A Ground Truth Bleed-Through Document Image Database | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 185-196 | |
| Róisín Rowley-Brooke; François Pitié; Anil C. Kokaram | |||
| This paper introduces a new database of 25 recto/verso image pairs from
documents suffering from bleed-through degradation, together with manually
created foreground text masks. The structure and creation of the database is
described, and three bleed-through restoration methods are compared in two
ways; visually, and quantitatively using the ground truth masks. Keywords: Document database; bleed-through; document restoration | |||
| Identifying "Soft 404" Error Pages: Analyzing the Lexical Signatures of Documents in Distributed Collections | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 197-208 | |
| Luis Meneses; Richard Furuta; Frank Shipman | |||
| Collections of Web-based resources are often decentralized; leaving the task
of identifying and locating removed resources to collection managers who must
rely on http response codes. When a resource is no longer available, the server
is supposed to return a 404 error code. In practice and to be friendlier to
human readers, many servers respond with a 200 OK code and indicate in the text
of the response that the document is no longer available. In the reported
study, 3.41% of servers respond in this manner. To help collection managers
identify these "friendly" or "soft" 404s, we developed two methods that use a
Naïve Bayes classifier based on known valid responses and known 404
responses. The classifier was able to predict soft 404 pages with a precision
of 99% and a recall of 92%. We will also elaborate on the results obtained from
our study and will detail the lessons learned. Keywords: Soft 404; Web resource management; distributed collections | |||
| User-Defined Semantic Enrichment of Full-Text Documents: Experiences and Lessons Learned | | BIBA | Full-Text | 209-214 | |
| Annika Hinze; Ralf Heese; Alexa Schlegel; Markus Luczak-Rösch | |||
| Semantic annotation of digital documents is typically done at meta-data level. However, for fine-grained access semantic enrichment of text elements or passages is needed. Automatic annotation is not of sufficient quality to enable focused search and retrieval: either too many or too few terms are semantically annotated. User-defined semantic enrichment allows for a more targeted approach. We developed a tool for semantic annotation of digital documents and conducted a number of studies to evaluate its acceptance by and usability for non-expert users. This paper discusses the lessons learned about both the semantic enrichment process and our methodology of exposing non-experts to semantic enrichment. | |||
| Semantic Document Selection -- Historical Research on Collections That Span Multiple Centuries | | BIBA | Full-Text | 215-221 | |
| Daan Odijk; Ork de Rooij; Maria-Hendrike Peetz; Toine Pieters; Maarten de Rijke; Stephen Snelders | |||
| The availability of digitized collections of historical data, such as newspapers, increases every day. With that, so does the wish for historians to explore these collections. Methods that are traditionally used to examine a collection do not scale up to today's collection sizes. We propose a method that combines text mining with exploratory search to provide historians with a means of interactively selecting and inspecting relevant documents from very large collections. We assess our proposal with a case study on a prototype system. | |||
| Finding Quality Issues in SKOS Vocabularies | | BIBA | Full-Text | 222-233 | |
| Christian Mader; Bernhard Haslhofer; Antoine Isaac | |||
| The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a standard model for controlled vocabularies on the Web. However, SKOS vocabularies often differ in terms of quality, which reduces their applicability across system boundaries. Here we investigate how we can support taxonomists in improving SKOS vocabularies by pointing out quality issues that go beyond the integrity constraints defined in the SKOS specification. We identified potential quantifiable quality issues and formalized them into computable quality checking functions that can find affected resources in a given SKOS vocabulary. We implemented these functions in the qSKOS quality assessment tool, analyzed 15 existing vocabularies, and found possible quality issues in all of them. | |||
| On MultiView-Based Meta-learning for Automatic Quality Assessment of Wiki Articles | | BIBA | Full-Text | 234-246 | |
| Daniel Hasan Dalip; Marcos André Gonçalves; Marco Cristo; Pável Calado | |||
| The Internet has seen a surge of new types of repositories with free access and collaborative open edition. However, this large amount of information, made available democratically and virtually without any control, raises questions about its quality. In this work, we investigate the use of meta-learning techniques to combine sets of semantically related quality indicators (aka, views) in order to automatically assess the quality of wiki articles. The idea is inspired on the combination of multiple (quality) experts. We perform a thorough analysis of the proposed multiview-based meta-learning approach in 3 collections. In our experiments, meta-learning was able to improve the performance of a state-of-the-art method in all tested datasets, with gains of up to 27% in quality assessment. | |||
| A Methodology for Folksonomy Evaluation | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 247-259 | |
| Spyros Daglas; Constantia Kakali; Dionysis Kakavoulis; Marina Koumaki; Christos Papatheodorou | |||
| In recent years, the folksonomies were created and maintained in libraries
and other information organizations alongside the traditional subject indexing
systems. Folksonomies, consisting of tags, often express the "wisdom of the
crowd". Despite their weaknesses and unstructured form, they reveal the
language of users or even the terminology of the experts. This knowledge could
be exploited in order to update and enrich the indexing vocabularies, thus
improving information services. This paper deals with the design of an
evaluation model for social tags. It introduces four quality indicators for an
information service which offers social tagging functionalities, a weighted
metric for the tag assessment process and a set of evaluation criteria that
support information professionals to select meaningful tags as new descriptors
to a set of bibliographic records. Keywords: social tagging; folksonomy; subject indexing; evaluation | |||
| Advanced Automatic Mapping from Flat or Hierarchical Metadata Schemas to a Semantic Web Ontology -- Requirements, Languages, Tools | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 260-272 | |
| Justyna Walkowska; Marcin Werla | |||
| This paper is dedicated to the issue of automatic mapping from flat or
hierarchical metadata schemas to Semantic Web data formats. It proposes a
checklist of requirements for such mappings and, based on this checklist, tries
to compare functionalities of existing mapping tools. Finally, it introduces
jMet2Ont, an open source mapping tool created by PSNC during the SYNAT research
project. Keywords: Metadata Mapping; Semantic Web; Dublin Core; MARC21; CIDOC CRM; FRBRoo; EDM;
OWL; RDF | |||
| Ontological Formalization of Scientific Experiments Based on Core Scientific Metadata Model | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 273-279 | |
| Armand Brahaj; Matthias Razum; Frank Schwichtenberg | |||
| This paper describes an ontology for the representation of contextual
information for laboratory-centered scientific experiments based on Core of
Scientific Metadata Model. This information describes entities such as
instruments, investigations, studies, researchers, and institutions that play a
key role in the generation of research data, thus forming an important source
for understanding the provenance of the data. Formalization of this information
in the form of an ontology and reusing existing and well-established
vocabularies foster the publication of research data and accompanying
provenance metadata as Linked Open Data. Core Scientific Model Ontology (CSMO)
is part of a larger effort, which includes data acquisition in the laboratory
and semi-automated metadata generation. It is intended to support cataloging,
data curation and data reuse. A formal definition of the RDF classes and
properties introduced for CSMO is provided. We demonstrate the efficacy of this
ontology by applying it to two different research domains. Keywords: Ontologies; research data management; data cataloging; contextual
information; scientific experiments; science study; CSMD; CSMO | |||
| Domain Analysis for a Video Game Metadata Schema: Issues and Challenges | | BIBA | Full-Text | 280-285 | |
| Jin Ha Lee; Joseph T. Tennis; Rachel Ivy Clarke | |||
| As interest in video games increases, so does the need for intelligent access to them. However, traditional organization systems and standards fall short. Through domain analysis and cataloging real-world examples while attempting to develop a formal metadata schema for video games, we encountered challenges in description. Inconsistent, vague, and subjective sources of information for genre, release date, feature, region, language, developer and publisher information confirm the importance of developing a standardized description model for video games. | |||
| A Benchmark for Content-Based Retrieval in Bivariate Data Collections | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 286-297 | |
| Maximilian Scherer; Tatiana von Landesberger; Tobias Schreck | |||
| Huge amounts of various research data are produced and made publicly
available in digital libraries. An important category is bivariate data
(measurements of one variable versus the other). Examples of bivariate data
include observations of temperature and ozone levels (e.g., in environmental
observation), domestic production and unemployment (e.g., in economics), or
education and income level levels (in the social sciences). For accessing these
data, content-based retrieval is an important query modality. It allows
researchers to search for specific relationships among data variables (e.g.,
quadratic dependence of temperature on altitude). However, such retrieval is to
date a challenge, as it is not clear which similarity measures to apply.
Various approaches have been proposed, yet no benchmarks to compare their
retrieval effectiveness have been defined.
In this paper, we construct a benchmark for retrieval of bivariate data. It is based on a large collection of bivariate research data. To define similarity classes, we use category information that was annotated by domain experts. The resulting similarity classes are used to compare several recently proposed content-based retrieval approaches for bivariate data, by means of precision and recall. This study is the first to present an encompassing benchmark data set and compare the performance of respective techniques. We also identify potential research directions based on the results obtained for bivariate data. The benchmark and implementations of similarity functions are made available, to foster research in this emerging area of content-based retrieval. Keywords: bivariate data; benchmarking; content-based retrieval; feature extraction | |||
| Web Search Personalization Using Social Data | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 298-310 | |
| Dong Zhou; Séamus Lawless; Vincent Wade | |||
| Web search that utilizes social tagging data suffers from an extreme example
of the vocabulary mismatch problem encountered in traditional Information
Retrieval (IR). This is due to the personalized, unrestricted vocabulary that
users choose to describe and tag each resource. Previous research has proposed
the utilization of query expansion to deal with search in this rather
complicated space. However, non-personalized approaches based on relevance
feedback and personalized approaches based on co-occurrence statistics have
only demonstrated limited improvements. This paper proposes an Iterative
Personalized Query Expansion Algorithm for Web Search (iPAW), which is based on
individual user profiles mined from the annotations and resources the user has
marked. The method also incorporates a user model constructed from a
co-occurrence matrix and from a Tag-Topic model where annotations and web
documents are connected in a latent graph. The experimental results suggest
that the proposed personalized query expansion method can produce better
results than both the classical non-personalized search approach and other
personalized query expansion methods. An "adaptivity factor" was further
investigated to adjust the level of personalization. Keywords: Personalized Web Search; Query Expansion; Social Data; Tag-Topic Model;
Graph Algorithm | |||
| A Model for Searching Musical Scores by Instrumentation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 311-316 | |
| Michel Beigbeder | |||
| We propose here a preliminary study on the definition of a search model that allows to look for musical scores that exactly or approximately match a query where the query defines the exact instrumentation wanted by the user. We define two versions of approximate matchings. In the first one, the ranking is done with a crisp matching of the instruments. In the second one we relax this constraint and we use a similarity between instruments. We present a first experiment and envision future works. | |||
| Extending Term Suggestion with Author Names | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 317-322 | |
| Philipp Schaer; Philipp Mayr; Thomas Lüke | |||
| Term suggestion or recommendation modules can help users to formulate their
queries by mapping their personal vocabularies onto the specialized vocabulary
of a digital library. While we examined actual user queries of the social
sciences digital library Sowiport we could see that nearly one third of the
users were explicitly looking for author names rather than terms. Common term
recommenders neglect this fact. By picking up the idea of polyrepresentation we
could show that in a standardized IR evaluation setting we can significantly
increase the retrieval performances by adding topical-related author names to
the query. This positive effect only appears when the query is additionally
expanded with thesaurus terms. By just adding the author names to a query we
often observe a query drift which results in worse results. Keywords: Term Suggestion; Query Suggestion; Evaluation; Digital Libraries; Query
Expansion; Polyrepresentation | |||
| Evaluating the Use of Clustering for Automatically Organising Digital Library Collections | | BIBA | Full-Text | 323-334 | |
| Mark Hall; Paul Clough; Mark Stevenson | |||
| Large digital libraries have become available over the past years through digitisation and aggregation projects. These large collections present a challenge to the new user who wishes to discover what is available in the collections. Subject classification can help in this task, however in large collections it is frequently incomplete or inconsistent. Automatic clustering algorithms provide a solution to this, however the question remains whether they produce clusters that are sufficiently cohesive and distinct for them to be used in supporting discovery and exploration in digital libraries. In this paper we present a novel approach to investigating cluster cohesion that is based on identifying instruders in a cluster. The results from a human-subject experiment show that clustering algorithms produce clusters that are sufficiently cohesive to be used where no (consistent) manual classification exists. | |||
| A Unique Arrangement: Organizing Collections for Digital Libraries, Archives, and Repositories | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 335-344 | |
| Jeff Crow; Luis Francisco-Revilla; April Norris; Shilpa Shukla; Ciaran B. Trace | |||
| Digital libraries increasingly host collections that are archival in nature,
and contain digitized and born-digital materials. In order to preserve the
evidentiary value of these materials, the collection organization must capture
the general context and preserve the relationships among objects. Archival
processing is a well-established method for organizing collections this way.
However, the current archival workflow leads to artificial boundaries between
materials and delays in getting digitized content online because physical and
born-digital materials are processed independently, and digitized materials not
at all. In response, this work explores the approach of processing materials in
a digitized form using a large multi-touch table. This alternative workflow
provides the first step towards integrating the archival processing of digital
and physical materials, and can expedite the process of making the materials
available online. However, this approach demands high quality digitization and
requires that archivists perform additional tasks like matching multi-sided,
multi-paged documents. Keywords: Multi-touch; archival processing; digitized materials | |||
| Mix-n-Match: Building Personal Libraries from Web Content | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 345-356 | |
| Matthias Geel; Timothy Church; Moira C. Norrie | |||
| We present an approach to web content aggregation that allows information to
be harvested from web pages, independent of specific markup languages. It
builds on ideas from data warehousing and we present solutions to the
well-known problems of data integration, namely detection of equivalences and
data cleaning, adapted to this context. We describe how the content aggregation
engine has been realised as an extensible framework in such a way that
end-users as well as developers can use the associated tools to create personal
libraries of content extracted from the web. Keywords: content aggregation; data integration; data harvesting | |||
| Machine Learning in Building a Collection of Computer Science Course Syllabi | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 357-362 | |
| Nakul Rathod; Lillian N. Cassel | |||
| Syllabi are rich educational resources. However, finding Computer Science
syllabi on a generic search engine does not work well. Towards our goal of
building a syllabus collection we have trained various Decision Tree,
Naive-Bayes, Support Vector Machine and Feed-Forward Neural Network classifiers
to recognize Computer Science syllabi from other web pages. We have also
trained our classifiers to distinguish between Artificial Intelligence and
Software Engineering syllabi. Our best classifiers are 95% accurate at both the
tasks. We present an analysis of the various feature selection methods and
classifiers we used hoping to help others developing their own collections. Keywords: Syllabus; Feature Selection; Text Classification; Machine Learning | |||
| PubLight: Managing Publications Using a Task-Oriented Approach | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 363-369 | |
| Matthias Geel; Michael Nebeling; Moira C. Norrie | |||
| We report on the development of a powerful and task-oriented tool for the
management of research publications. The work was motivated by a survey showing
that researchers still rely heavily on basic tools such as text editors for
managing bibliographic data. We present the approach as well as the resulting
tool, PubLight, and compare the features of this tool with existing reference
management systems. Keywords: task-oriented information management; publications tool; reference
management | |||
| Improved Bibliographic Reference Parsing Based on Repeated Patterns | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 370-382 | |
| Guido Sautter; Klemens Böhm | |||
| Parsing details like author names and titles out of bibliographic references
of scientific publications is an important issue. However, most existing
techniques are tailored to the highly standardized reference styles used in the
last two to three decades. Their performance tends to degrade when faced with
the wider variety of reference styles used in older, historic publications.
Thus, existing techniques are of limited use when creating comprehensive
bibliographies covering both historic and contemporary scientific publications.
This paper presents RefParse, a generic approach to bibliographic reference
parsing that is independent of any specific reference style. Its core feature
is an inference mechanism that exploits the regularities inherent in any list
of references to deduce its format. Our evaluation shows that RefParse
outperforms existing parsers both for contemporary and for historic reference
lists. Keywords: Parsing; Bibliography Data; Algorithms | |||
| Catching the Drift -- Indexing Implicit Knowledge in Chemical Digital Libraries | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 383-395 | |
| Benjamin Köhncke; Sascha Tönnies; Wolf-Tilo Balke | |||
| In the domain of chemistry the information gathering process is highly
focused on chemical entities. But due to synonyms and different entity
representations the indexing of chemical documents is a challenging process.
Considering the field of drug design, the task is even more complex. Domain
experts from this field are usually not interested in any chemical entity
itself, but in representatives of some chemical class showing a specific
reaction behavior. For describing such a reaction behavior of chemical entities
the most interesting parts are their functional groups. The restriction of each
chemical class is somehow also related to the entities' reaction behavior, but
further based on the chemist's implicit knowledge. In this paper we present an
approach dealing with this implicit knowledge by clustering chemical entities
based on their functional groups. However, since such clusters are generally
too unspecific, containing chemical entities from different chemical classes,
we further divide them into sub-clusters using fingerprint based similarity
measures. We analyze several uncorrelated fingerprint/similarity measure
combinations and show that the most similar entities with respect to a query
entity can be found in the respective sub-cluster. Furthermore, we use our
approach for document retrieval introducing a new similarity measure based on
Wikipedia categories. Our evaluation shows that the sub-clustering leads to
suitable results enabling sophisticated document retrieval in chemical digital
libraries. Keywords: chemical digital collections; document ranking; clustering | |||
| Using Visual Cues for the Extraction of Web Image Semantic Information | | BIBA | Full-Text | 396-401 | |
| Georgina Tryfou; Nicolas Tsapatsoulis | |||
| Mining information for the images that currently exist in huge amounts on the web, has been a main scientific interest during the past years. Several methods have been exploited and web image information is extracted from textual sources such as image file names, anchor texts, existing keywords and, of course, surrounding text. However, the systems that attempt to mine information for images using surrounding text suffer from several problems, such as the inability to correctly assign all relevant text to an image and discard the irrelevant text as well. A novel method for extracting web image information is discussed in the present paper. The proposed system uses visual cues in order to cluster a web page into several regions and assign to each hosted image the text that most possibly refers to it. Three different approaches to the problem of text to image assignment are discussed and evaluated. The evaluation procedure indicates the advantages of using visual cues and two dimensional euclidean measures for extracting information for web images. | |||
| Malleable Finding Aids | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 402-407 | |
| Scott R. Anderson; Robert B. Allen | |||
| We show a prototype implementation of a Wiki-based Malleable Finding Aid
that provides features to support user engagement and we discuss the
contribution of individual features such as graphical representations, a table
of contents, interactive sorting of entries, and the possibility for user
tagging. Finally, we explore the implications of Malleable Finding Aids for
collections which are richly inter-linked and which support a fully social
Archival Commons. Keywords: Archives; Finding Aid; User Engagement; Wiki | |||
| Improving Retrieval Results with Discipline-Specific Query Expansion | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 408-413 | |
| Thomas Lüke; Philipp Schaer; Philipp Mayr | |||
| Choosing the right terms to describe an information need is becoming more
difficult as the amount of available information increases.
Search-Term-Recommendation (STR) systems can help to overcome these problems.
This paper evaluates the benefits that may be gained from the use of STRs in
Query Expansion (QE). We create 17 STRs, 16 based on specific disciplines and
one giving general recommendations, and compare the retrieval performance of
these STRs. The main findings are: (1) QE with specific STRs leads to
significantly better results than QE with a general STR, (2) QE with specific
STRs selected by a heuristic mechanism of topic classification leads to better
results than the general STR, however (3) selecting the best matching specific
STR in an automatic way is a major challenge of this process. Keywords: Term Suggestion; Information Retrieval; Thesaurus; Query Expansion; Digital
Libraries; Search Term Recommendation | |||
| An Evaluation System for Digital Libraries | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 414-419 | |
| Alexander Nussbaumer; Eva-Catherine Hillemann; Christina M. Steiner; Dietrich Albert | |||
| Evaluation is an important task for digital libraries, because it reveals
relevant information about their quality. This paper presents a conceptual and
technical approach to support the systematic evaluation of digital libraries in
three ways and a system is presented that assists during the entire evaluation
process. First, it allows for formally modelling the evaluation goals and
designing the evaluation process. Second, it allows for data collection in a
continuous and non-continuous, invasive and non-invasive way. Third, it
automatically creates reports based on the defined evaluation models. On the
basis of an example evaluation it is outlined how the evaluation process can be
designed and supported with this system. Keywords: evaluation; evaluation system; digital libraries; continuous data
collection; evaluation report | |||
| Enhancing Digital Libraries and Portals with Canonical Structures for Complex Objects | | BIBA | Full-Text | 420-425 | |
| Scott Britell; Lois M. L. Delcambre; Lillian N. Cassel; Edward A. Fox; Richard Furuta | |||
| Individual digital library resources are of interest in their own right, but, in some domains, resources can be part of (perhaps multiple) complex objects. We focus on domains with complex objects where a digital library user can benefit from seeing and browsing a resource in the context of its structure(s). We introduce canonical structures that can represent local digital library structures; the canonical structures allow us to provide sophisticated browsing/navigation aids in a generic way. We evaluate a means to transfer the structure of our resources to a digital library portal. We implement and evaluate approaches based on OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE using Dublin Core -- with and without a custom namespace. We also transfer the canonical structure to a portal where our navigation widget is implemented. | |||
| Exploiting the Social and Semantic Web for Guided Web Archiving | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 426-432 | |
| Thomas Risse; Stefan Dietze; Wim Peters; Katerina Doka; Yannis Stavrakas; Pierre Senellart | |||
| The constantly growing amount of Web content and the success of the Social
Web lead to increasing needs for Web archiving. These needs go beyond the pure
preservation of Web pages. Web archives are turning into "community memories"
that aim at building a better understanding of the public view on, e.g.,
celebrities, court decisions, and other events. In this paper we present the
ARCOMEM architecture that uses semantic information such as entities, topics,
and events complemented with information from the social Web to guide a novel
Web crawler. The resulting archives are automatically enriched with semantic
meta-information to ease the access and allow retrieval based on conditions
that involve high-level concepts. Keywords: Web Archiving; Web Crawler; Text Analysis; Social Web | |||
| Query Expansion of Zero-Hit Subject Searches: Using a Thesaurus in Conjunction with NLP Techniques | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 433-438 | |
| Sarantos Kapidakis; Anna Mastora; Manolis Peponakis | |||
| The focus of our study is zero-hit queries in keyword subject searches and
the effort of increasing recall in these cases by reformulating and, then,
expanding the initial queries using an external source of knowledge, namely a
thesaurus. To this end, the objectives of this study are twofold. First, we
perform the mapping of query terms to the thesaurus terms. Second, we use the
matched terms to expand the user's initial query by taking advantage of the
thesaurus relations and implementing natural language processing (NLP)
techniques. We report on the overall procedure and elaborate on key points and
considerations of each step of the process. Keywords: Query expansion; Thesaurus; Zero-hit queries; NLP techniques | |||
| Towards Digital Repository Interoperability: The Document Indexing and Semantic Tagging Interface for Libraries (DISTIL) | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 439-444 | |
| Michael Khoo; Douglas Tudhope; Ceri Binding; Eileen G. Abels; Xia Lin; Diane Massam | |||
| The question of how to integrate diverse digital repositories into a unified
information infrastructure, accessible and discoverable through simple
interfaces, remains a central research issue for digital libraries. Many
collections are described by specialized metadata, which currently has to be
mapped and crosswalked to a standard format in order to be useful. However,
this metadata work can be expensive and resource consuming. We describe
work-in-progress with DISTIL (Document Indexing & Semantic Tagging
Interface for Libraries) to support federated cross-collection search in
humanities and the social sciences. DISTIL proposes to support interoperability
by generating Dewey Decimal Classification 'tags' from individual metadata
records. The resulting tags can then be used to support cross-collection
browsing. We focus here on some of the initial pre-processing stages of the
metadata workflow, which include cleaning and formatting metadata records, in
order to extract terms that can then be used to generate the DDC tags. Some
initial strategies for and issues with this workflow are described. Keywords: dewey decimal classification; digital humanities; interoperability;
metadata; social sciences; tagging | |||
| Aggregating Content for Europeana: A Workflow to Support Content Providers | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 445-454 | |
| Valentina Vassallo; Marzia Piccininno | |||
| This document comes from the experiences of the authors as leaders of Work
Packages about "Coordination of content" within the digital library projects to
aggregate content to Europeana. In particular, it will focus on two projects,
ATHENA and Linked Heritage (LH), with the definition of a workflow and a
structured organization for content aggregation. The large amount of digital
objects, coming from various European cultural institutions, has to be
aggregated (at national level and/or for Europeana) creating good practices and
implementing solutions to sustain the material aggregation in a long term
perspective. Keywords: Aggregation; Standards; Europeana | |||
| Diva: A Web-Based High-Resolution Digital Document Viewer | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 455-460 | |
| Andrew Hankinson; Wendy Liu; Laurent Pugin; Ichiro Fujinaga | |||
| This paper introduces the Diva (Document Image Viewer with Ajax) project.
Diva is a multi-page image viewer, designed for web-based digital libraries to
present documents in a web browser. Key features of Diva include: "lazily
loading" only the parts of the document the user is viewing, the ability to
"zoom" in and out for viewing high-resolution page images, support for Pyramid
TIFF or multi-resolution JPEG 2000 images, a multi-page "grid" view for page
images, and HTML5 canvas support for document image rotation and
brightness/contrast control. We briefly discuss the history and motivation
behind its development, provide an overview of how it compares to other
document image viewers, illustrate the different components of Diva and how it
works, and provide examples of how this may be used in a digital library
context. Keywords: Document images; image viewer; web applications | |||
| Collaborative Authoring of Walden's Paths | | BIBA | Full-Text | 461-467 | |
| Yuangling Li; Paul Logasa, II Bogen; Daniel Pogue; Richard Furuta; Frank Shipman | |||
| This paper presents a prototype of an authoring tool to allow users to collaboratively build, annotate, manage, share and reuse collections of distributed resources from the World Wide Web. This extends on the Walden's Path project's work to help educators bring resources found on the World Wide Web into a linear contextualized structure. The introduction of collaborative authoring feature fosters collaborative learning activities through social interaction among participants, where participants can coauthor paths in groups. Besides, the prototype supports path sharing, branching and reusing; specifically, individual participant can contribute to the group with private collections of knowledge resources; paths completed by group can be shared among group members, such that participants can tailor, extend, reorder and/or replace nodes to have sub versions of shared paths for different information needs. | |||
| Quantitative Analysis of Search Sessions Enhanced by Gaze Tracking with Dynamic Areas of Interest | | BIBA | Full-Text | 468-473 | |
| Vu Tuan Tran; Norbert Fuhr | |||
| After presenting the ezDL experimental framework for the evaluation of user interfaces to digital library systems, we describe a new method for the quantitative analysis of user search sessions at a cognitive level. We combine system logs with gaze tracking, which is enhanced by a new framework for capturing dynamic areas of interest. This observation data is mapped onto a user action level. Then the user search process is modeled as a Markov-chain. The analysis not only allows for a better understanding of user behavior, but also points out possible system improvements. | |||
| Generating Content for Digital Libraries Using an Interactive Content Management System | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 474-479 | |
| Uros Damnjanovic; Sorin Hermon | |||
| The goal of this paper is to present an interactive content management
system for generating content of a digital library. The idea is to use
interaction and data visualization techniques in the process of content
generation, to check, understand and modify available information. We show the
importance of interacting with data during the process of library creation and
how this can lead to better quality of data. We present browsing
functionalities for exploring relations within data that are used in the Human
Sanctuary project. The set of developed tools can easily be extended and used
for generating content in any other digital library project. Keywords: Digital libraries; digital repositories; user interface; data visualization;
human computer interaction | |||
| Enhancing the Curation of Botanical Data Using Text Analysis Tools | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 480-485 | |
| Clare Llewellyn; Clare Grover; Jon Oberlander; Elspeth Haston | |||
| Automatic text analysis tools have significant potential to improve the
productivity of those who organise large collections of data. However, to be
effective, they have to be both technically efficient and provide a productive
interaction with the user. Geographic referencing of historical botanical data
is difficult, time consuming and relies heavily on the expertise of the
curators. Botanical specimens that have poor quality labelling are often
disregarded and the information is lost. This work highlights how the use of
automated analysis methods can be used to assist in the curation of a botanical
specimen library. Keywords: text analysis; text mining; geographical location; assisted curation; botany | |||
| Ranking Distributed Knowledge Repositories | | BIBA | Full-Text | 486-491 | |
| Robert Neumayer; Krisztian Balog; Kjetil Nørvåg | |||
| Increasingly many knowledge bases are published as Linked Data, driving the need for effective and efficient techniques for information access. Knowledge repositories are naturally organised around objects or entities and constitute a promising data source for entity-oriented search. There is a growing body of research on the subject, however, it is almost always (implicitly) assumed that a centralised index of all data is available. In this paper, we address the task of ranking distributed knowledge repositories -- a vital component of federated search systems -- and present two probabilistic methods based on generative language modeling techniques. We present a benchmarking testbed based on the test suites of the Semantic Search Challenge series to evaluate our approaches. In our experiments, we show that both our ranking approaches provide competitive performance and offer a viable alternative to centralised retrieval. | |||
| The CMDI MI Search Engine: Access to Language Resources and Tools Using Heterogeneous Metadata Schemas | | BIBA | Full-Text | 492-495 | |
| Junte Zhang; Marc Kemps-Snijders; Hans Bennis | |||
| The CLARIN Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) provides a solution for access to different types of language resources and tools across Europe. Researchers have different research data and tools, which are large-scale and described differently with domain-specific metadata. In the context of the Search & Develop (S&D) project at the Meertens Institute within CLARIN, we present a system description of an advanced search engine that semantically converges differently structured metadata records based on CMDI for search and retrieval. It allows different groups of users -- such as language researchers -- to search across yet unexplored research data and locate relevant data for new insights, and find existing tools that could provide novel use cases. | |||
| SIARD Archive Browser | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 496-499 | |
| Arif Ur Rahman; Gabriel David; Cristina Ribeiro | |||
| SIARD Suite enables us to preserve a relational database in an open format.
It migrates a relational database to SIARD format and preserves technical and
contextual metadata along with the primary data ensuring long term
accessibility.
This paper introduces a web application, the SIARD Archive Browser, which allows operations on the archive such as searching for a specific record, counting records in a table containing a keyword, sorting by a column and making joins. In many use cases, the application avoids the need to load a preserved database to a DBMS. Keywords: SIARD; database archiving; database preservation | |||
| PATHS -- Exploring Digital Cultural Heritage Spaces | | BIBA | Full-Text | 500-503 | |
| Mark Hall; Eneko Agirre; Nikolaos Aletras; Runar Bergheim; Konstantinos Chandrinos; Paul Clough; Samuel Fernando; Kate Fernie; Paula Goodale; Jillian Griffiths; Oier Lopez de Lacalle; Andrea de Polo; Aitor Soroa; Mark Stevenson | |||
| Large amounts of digital cultural heritage (CH) information have become available over the past years, requiring more powerful exploration systems than just a search box. The PATHS system aims to provide an environment in which users can successfully explore a large, unknown collection through two modalities: following existing paths to learn about what is available and then freely exploring. | |||
| FrbrVis: An Information Visualization Approach to Presenting FRBR Work Families | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 504-507 | |
| Tanja Mercun; Maja Zumer; Trond Aalberg | |||
| Although FRBR is becoming an important player in the bibliographic world, we
have not seen many discussions or examples of how FRBR-based entities or
relationships could best be displayed, explored or interacted with within a
user interface. The paper presents a FrbrVis prototype as one possible approach
to presenting FRBR-based bibliographic data using hierarchical information
visualization structures and looks into how FRBR concepts have been implemented
into an interactive user interface display. Keywords: FRBR; Information Visualization; User Interface; Interaction | |||
| Metadata Enrichment Services for the Europeana Digital Library | | BIBA | Full-Text | 508-511 | |
| Giacomo Berardi; Andrea Esuli; Sergiu Gordea; Diego Marcheggiani; Fabrizio Sebastiani | |||
| We demonstrate a metadata enrichment system for the Europeana digital library. The system allows different institutions which provide to Europeana pointers (in the form of metadata records -- MRs) to their content to enrich their MRs by classifying them under a classification scheme of their choice, and to extract/highlight entities of significant interest within the MRs themselves. The use of a supervised learning metaphor allows each content provider (CP) to generate classifiers and extractors tailored to the CP's specific needs, thus allowing the tool to be effectively available to the multitude (2000+) of Europeana CPs. | |||
| Collaboratively Creating a Thematic Repository Using Interactive Table-Top Technology | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 512-516 | |
| Fernando Loizides; Christina Vasiliou; Andri Ioannou; Panayiotis Zaphiris | |||
| This paper reports on the design and development of a surface computing
application in support of collaborative idea creation and thematic
categorisation. C.A.R.T (Collaborative Assisted Repository for Tabletops)
allows up to 4 users to simultaneously interact with virtual objects, each
containing a single concept, to create thematic categories. Each object, which
replicates a physical post-it on a multi-touch tabletop, is created by one of
the team members either previous to the meeting or during the initial stage.
The application then encourages the exchange of debate and conversation by
presenting the ideas one at a time for users to discuss and categorise. The
resulting idea repository can be used for roadmap creation as well as
comparative studies using further participants. The application's main task is
similar to that of card sorting and affinity diagramming. We report on the
functionality of the application which was designed and developed following a
user-centred approach. Keywords: Digital Repositories; Idea Mapping; Tabletops | |||