Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services – serie

Citation analysis—the exploration of reference patterns in the scholarly and scientific literature—has long been applied in a number of social sciences to study research impact, knowledge flows, and knowledge networks. It has important information science applications as well, particularly in knowledge representation and in information retrieval. Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in citation analysis to help address research, management, or information service issues such as university rankings, research evaluation, or knowledge domain visualization. This renewed and growing interest stems from significant improvements in the availability and accessibility of digital bibliographic data (both citation and full text) and of relevant computer technologies. The former provides large amounts of data and the latter the necessary tools for researchers to conduct new types of large-scale citation analysis, even without special access to special data collections. Exciting new developments are emerging this way in many aspects of citation analysis. This book critically examines both theory and practical techniques of citation network analysis and visualization, one of the two main types of citation analysis (the other being evaluative citation analysis). To set the context for its main theme, the book begins with a discussion of the foundations of citation analysis in general, including an overview of what can and what cannot be done with citation analysis (Chapter 1). An in-depth examination of the generally accepted steps and procedures for citation network analysis follows, including the concepts and techniques that are associated with each step (Chapter 2). Individual issues that are particularly important in citation network analysis are then scrutinized, namely: field delineation and data sources for citation analysis (Chapter 3); disambiguation of names and references (Chapter 4); and visualization of citation networks (Chapter 5). Sufficient technical detail is provided in each chapter so the book can serve as a practical how-to guide to conducting citation network analysis and visualization studies. While the discussion of most of the topics in this book applies to all types of citation analysis, the structure of the text and the details of procedures, examples, and tools covered here are geared to citation network analysis rather than evaluative citation analysis. This conscious choice was based on the authors’ observation that, compared to evaluative citation analysis, citation network analysis has not been covered nearly as well by dedicated books, despite the fact that it has not been subject to nearly as much severe criticism and has been substantially enriched in recent years with new theory and techniques from research areas such as network science, social network analysis, or information visualization. Table of Contents: Acknowledgment / Dedications /Foundations of Citation Analysis / Conducting Citation Network Analysis: Steps,Concepts, Techniques, and Tools / Field Delineation and Data Sources for Citation Analysis / Disambiguation in Citation Network Analysis / Visualization of Citation Networks / Appendix 3.3 / Appendix 5.4.2 / Bibliography / Author Biographies

Improvements in network bandwidth along with dramatic drops in digital storage and processing costs have resulted in the explosive growth of multimedia (combinations of text, image, audio, and video) resources on the Internet and in digital repositories. A suite of computer technologies delivering speech, image, and natural language understanding can automatically derive descriptive metadata for such resources. Difficulties for end users ensue, however, with the tremendous volume and varying quality of automated metadata for multimedia information systems. This lecture surveys automatic metadata creation methods for dealing with multimedia information resources, using broadcast news, documentaries, and oral histories as examples. Strategies for improving the utility of such metadata are discussed, including computationally intensive approaches, leveraging multimodal redundancy, folding in context, and leaving precision-recall tradeoffs under user control. Interfaces building from automatically generated metadata are presented, illustrating the use of video surrogates in multimedia information systems. Traditional information retrieval evaluation is discussed through the annual National Institute of Standards and Technology TRECVID forum, with experiments on exploratory search extending the discussion beyond fact-finding to broader, longer term search activities of learning, analysis, synthesis, and discovery. Table of Contents: Evolution of Multimedia Information Systems: 1990-2008 / Survey of Automatic Metadata Creation Methods / Refinement of Automatic Metadata / Multimedia Surrogates / End-User Utility for Metadata and Surrogates: Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Satisfaction

Let us start with a simple scenario: a man asks a woman "how high is Mount Everest?" The woman replies "29,029 feet." Nothing could be simpler. Now let us suppose that rather than standing in a room, or sitting on a bus, the man is at his desk and the woman is 300 miles away with the conversation taking place using e-mail. Still simple? Certainly--it happens every day. So why all the bother about digital (virtual, electronic, chat, etc.) reference? If the man is a pilot flying over Mount Everest, the answer matters. If you are a lawyer going to court, the identity of the woman is very important. Also, if you ever want to find the answer again, how that transaction took place matters a lot. Digital reference is a deceptively simple concept on its face: "the incorporation of human expertise into the information system." This lecture seeks to explore the question of how human expertise is incorporated into a variety of information systems, from libraries, to digital libraries, to information retrieval engines, to knowledge bases. What we learn through this endeavor, begun primarily in the library context, is that the models, methods, standards, and experiments in digital reference have wide applicability. We also catch a glimpse of an unfolding future in which ubiquitous computing makes the identification, interaction, and capture of expertise increasingly important. It is a future that is much more complex than we had anticipated. It is a future in which documents and artifacts are less important than the contexts of their creation and use. Table of Contents: Defining Reference in a Digital Age / Conversations / Digital Reference in Practice / Digital Reference an a New Future / Conclusion

As information becomes more ubiquitous and the demands that searchers have on search systems grow, there is a need to support search behaviors beyond simple lookup. Information seeking is the process or activity of attempting to obtain information in both human and technological contexts. Exploratory search describes an information-seeking problem context that is open-ended, persistent, and multifaceted, and information-seeking processes that are opportunistic, iterative, and multitactical. Exploratory searchers aim to solve complex problems and develop enhanced mental capacities. Exploratory search systems support this through symbiotic human-machine relationships that provide guidance in exploring unfamiliar information landscapes. Exploratory search has gained prominence in recent years. There is an increased interest from the information retrieval, information science, and human-computer interaction communities in moving beyond the traditional turn-taking interaction model supported by major Web search engines, and toward support for human intelligence amplification and information use. In this lecture, we introduce exploratory search, relate it to relevant extant research, outline the features of exploratory search systems, discuss the evaluation of these systems, and suggest some future directions for supporting exploratory search. Exploratory search is a new frontier in the search domain and is becoming increasingly important in shaping our future world. Table of Contents: Introduction / Defining Exploratory Search / Related Work / Features of Exploratory Search Systems / Evaluation of Exploratory Search Systems / Future Directions and concluding Remarks

Webometrics is concerned with measuring aspects of the web: web sites, web pages, parts of web pages, words in web pages, hyperlinks, web search engine results. The importance of the web itself as a communication medium and for hosting an increasingly wide array of documents, from journal articles to holiday brochures, needs no introduction. Given this huge and easily accessible source of information, there are limitless possibilities for measuring or counting on a huge scale (e.g., the number of web sites, the number of web pages, the number of blogs) or on a smaller scale (e.g., the number of web sites in Ireland, the number of web pages in the CNN web site, the number of blogs mentioning Barack Obama before the 2008 presidential campaign). This book argues that it can be useful for social scientists to measure aspects of the web and explains how this can be achieved on both a small and large scale. The book is intended for social scientists with research topics that are wholly or partly online (e.g., social networks, news, political communication) and social scientists with offline research topics with an online reflection, even if this is not a core component (e.g., diaspora communities, consumer culture, linguistic change). The book is also intended for library and information science students in the belief that the knowledge and techniques described will be useful for them to guide and aid other social scientists in their research. In addition, the techniques and issues are all directly relevant to library and information science research problems. Table of Contents: Introduction / Web Impact Assessment / Link Analysis / Blog Searching / Automatic Search Engine Searches: LexiURL Searcher / Web Crawling: SocSciBot / Search Engines and Data Reliability / Tracking User Actions Online / Advaned Techniques / Summary and Future Directions

We live in an information age that requires us, more than ever, to represent, access, and use information. Over the last several decades, we have developed a modern science and technology for information retrieval, relentlessly pursuing the vision of a "memex" that Vannevar Bush proposed in his seminal article, "As We May Think." Faceted search plays a key role in this program. Faceted search addresses weaknesses of conventional search approaches and has emerged as a foundation for interactive information retrieval. User studies demonstrate that faceted search provides more effective information-seeking support to users than best-first search. Indeed, faceted search has become increasingly prevalent in online information access systems, particularly for e-commerce and site search. In this lecture, we explore the history, theory, and practice of faceted search. Although we cannot hope to be exhaustive, our aim is to provide sufficient depth and breadth to offer a useful resource to bothresearchers and practitioners. Because faceted search is an area of interest to computer scientists, information scientists, interface designers, and usability researchers, we do not assume that the reader is a specialist in any of these fields. Rather, we offer a self-contained treatment of the topic, with an extensive bibliography for those who would like to pursue particular aspects in more depth. Table of Contents: I. Key Concepts / Introduction: What Are Facets? / Information Retrieval / Faceted Information Retrieval / II. Research and Practice / Academic Research / Commercial Applications / III. Practical Concerns / Back-End Concerns / Front-End Concerns / Conclusion / Glossary

Documents usually have a content and a structure. The content refers to the text of the document, whereas the structure refers to how a document is logically organized. An increasingly common way to encode the structure is through the use of a mark-up language. Nowadays, the most widely used mark-up language for representing structure is the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML). XML can be used to provide a focused access to documents, i.e. returning XML elements, such as sections and paragraphs, instead of whole documents in response to a query. Such focused strategies are of particular benefit for information repositories containing long documents, or documents covering a wide variety of topics, where users are directed to the most relevant content within a document. The increased adoption of XML to represent a document structure requires the development of tools to effectively access documents marked-up in XML. This book provides a detailed description of query languages, indexing strategies, ranking algorithms, presentation scenarios developed to access XML documents. Major advances in XML retrieval were seen from 2002 as a result of INEX, the Initiative for Evaluation of XML Retrieval. INEX, also described in this book, provided test sets for evaluating XML retrieval effectiveness. Many of the developments and results described in this book were investigated within INEX. Table of Contents: Introduction / Basic XML Concepts / Historical Perspectives / Query Languages / Indexing Strategies / Ranking Strategies / Presentation Strategies / Evaluating XML Retrieval Effectiveness / Conclusions

This lecture presents an overview of the Web analytics process, with a focus on providing insight and actionable outcomes from collecting and analyzing Internet data. The lecture first provides an overview of Web analytics, providing in essence, a condensed version of the entire lecture. The lecture then outlines the theoretical and methodological foundations of Web analytics in order to make obvious the strengths and shortcomings of Web analytics as an approach. These foundational elements include the psychological basis in behaviorism and methodological underpinning of trace data as an empirical method. These foundational elements are illuminated further through a brief history of Web analytics from the original transaction log studies in the 1960s through the information science investigations of library systems to the focus on Websites, systems, and applications. Following a discussion of on-going interaction data within the clickstream created using log files and page tagging foranalytics of Website and search logs, the lecture then presents a Web analytic process to convert these basic data to meaningful key performance indicators in order to measure likely converts that are tailored to the organizational goals or potential opportunities. Supplementary data collection techniques are addressed, including surveys and laboratory studies. The overall goal of this lecture is to provide implementable information and a methodology for understanding Web analytics in order to improve Web systems, increase customer satisfaction, and target revenue through effective analysis of user–Website interactions. Table of Contents: Understanding Web Analytics / The Foundations of Web Analytics: Theory and Methods / The History of Web Analytics / Data Collection for Web Analytics / Web Analytics Fundamentals / Web Analytics Strategy / Web Analytics as Competitive Intelligence / Supplementary Methods for Augmenting Web Analytics / Search Log Analytics / Conclusion / Key Terms / Blogs for Further Reading / References

The design space of information services evolved from seminal works through a set of prototypical hypermedia systems and matured in open and widely accessible web-based systems. The original concepts of hypermedia systems are now expressed in different forms and shapes. The first works on hypertext invented the term itself, laid out the foundational concept of association or link, and highlighted navigation as the core paradigm for the future information systems. The first engineered systems demonstrated architectural requirements and models and fostered the emergence of the conceptual model related with the information systems and the information design. The artifacts for interaction, navigation, and search, grew from the pioneering systems. Multimedia added a new dimension to hypertext, and mutated the term into hypermedia. The adaptation of the primitive models and mechanisms to the space of continuous media led to a further conceptual level and to the reinvention of information design methods. Hypermedia systems also became an ideal space for collaboration and cooperative work. Information access and sharing, and group work were enabled and empowered by distributed hypermedia systems. As with many technologies, a winning technical paradigm, in our case the World Wide Web, concentrated the design options, the architectural choices and the interaction and navigation styles. Since the late nineties, the Web became the standard framework for hypermedia systems, and integrated a large number of the initial concepts and techniques. Yet, other paths are still open. This lecture maps a simple "genome" of hypermedia systems, based on an initial survey of primitive systems that established architectural and functional characteristics, or traits. These are analyzed and consolidated using phylogenetic analysis tools, to infer families of systems and evolution opportunities. This method may prove to be inspiring for more systematic perspectives of technological landscapes. Table of Contents: Introduction / Original Visions and Concepts / Steps in the Evolution / Information and Structured Documents / Web-Based Environments / Some Research Trends / A Framework of Traits / A Phylogenetic Analysis / Conclusion

Developments over the last twenty years have fueled considerable speculation about the future of the book and of reading itself. This book begins with a gloss over the history of electronic books, including the social and technical forces that have shaped their development. The focus then shifts to reading and how we interact with what we read: basic issues such as legibility, annotation, and navigation are examined as aspects of reading that ebooks inherit from their print legacy. Because reading is fundamentally communicative, I also take a closer look at the sociality of reading: how we read in a group and how we share what we read. Studies of reading and ebook use are integrated throughout the book, but Chapter 5 "goes meta" to explore how a researcher might go about designing his or her own reading-related studies. No book about ebooks is complete without an explicit discussion of content preparation, i.e., how the electronic book is written. Hence, Chapter 6 delves into the underlying representation of ebooks and efforts to create and apply markup standards to them. This chapter also examines how print genres have made the journey to digital and how some emerging digital genres might be realized as ebooks. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses some beyond-the-book functionality: how can ebook platforms be transformed into portable personal libraries? In the end, my hope is that by the time the reader reaches the end of this book, he or she will feel equipped to perform the next set of studies, write the next set of articles, invent new ebook functionality, or simply engage in a heated argument with the stranger in seat 17C about the future of reading. Table of Contents: Preface / Figure Credits / Introduction / Reading / Interaction / Reading as a Social Activity / Studying Reading / Beyond the Book / References / Author Biography

This lecture introduces fundamental principles of online multiplayer games, primarily massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), suitable for students and faculty interested both in designing games and in doing research on them. The general focus is human-centered computing, which includes many human-computer interaction issues and emphasizes social computing, but also, looks at how the design of socio-economic interactions extends our traditional notions of computer programming to cover human beings as well as machines. In addition, it demonstrates a range of social science research methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative, that could be used by students for term papers, or by their professors for publications. In addition to drawing upon a rich literature about these games, this lecture is based on thousands of hours of first-hand research experience inside many classic examples, including World of Warcraft, The Matrix Online, Anarchy Online, Tabula Rasa, Entropia Universe, Dark Age of Camelot, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, Tale in the Desert, EVE Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and the non-game virtual world Second Life. Among the topics covered are historical-cultural origins of leading games, technical constraints that shape the experience, rolecoding and social control, player personality and motivation, relationships with avatars and characters, virtual professions and economies, social relations inside games, and the implications for the external society. Table of Contents: Introduction / Historical-Cultural Origins / Technical Constraints / Rolecoding and Social Control / Personality and Motivation / Avatars and Characters / Virtual Professions and Economies / Social Relations Inside Games / Implications for External Society

At its very core multimedia information retrieval means the process of searching for and finding multimedia documents; the corresponding research field is concerned with building the best possible multimedia search engines. The intriguing bit here is that the query itself can be a multimedia excerpt: For example, when you walk around in an unknown place and stumble across an interesting landmark, would it not be great if you could just take a picture with your mobile phone and send it to a service that finds a similar picture in a database and tells you more about the building -- and about its significance, for that matter? This book goes further by examining the full matrix of a variety of query modes versus document types. How do you retrieve a music piece by humming? What if you want to find news video clips on forest fires using a still image? The text discusses underlying techniques and common approaches to facilitate multimedia search engines from metadata driven retrieval, via piggy-back text retrieval where automated processes create text surrogates for multimedia, automated image annotation and content-based retrieval. The latter is studied in great depth looking at features and distances, and how to effectively combine them for efficient retrieval, to a point where the readers have the ingredients and recipe in their hands for building their own multimedia search engines. Supporting users in their resource discovery mission when hunting for multimedia material is not a technological indexing problem alone. We look at interactive ways of engaging with repositories through browsing and relevance feedback, roping in geographical context, and providing visual summaries for videos. The book concludes with an overview of state-of-the-art research projects in the area of multimedia information retrieval, which gives an indication of the research and development trends and, thereby, a glimpse of the future world. Table of Contents: What is Multimedia Information Retrieval? / Basic Multimedia Search Technologies / Content-based Retrieval in Depth / Added Services / Multimedia Information Retrieval Research / Summary

Today, Web search is treated as a solitary experience. Web browsers and search engines are typically designed to support a single user, working alone. However, collaboration on information-seeking tasks is actually commonplace. Students work together to complete homework assignments, friends seek information about joint entertainment opportunities, family members jointly plan vacation travel, and colleagues jointly conduct research for their projects. As improved networking technologies and the rise of social media simplify the process of remote collaboration, and large, novel display form-factors simplify the process of co-located group work, researchers have begun to explore ways to facilitate collaboration on search tasks. This lecture investigates the who, what, where, when and why of collaborative search, and gives insight in how emerging solutions can address collaborators' needs. Table of Contents: Introduction / Who? / What? / Where? / When? / Why? / Conclusion: How?

Policy-based data management enables the creation of community-specific collections. Every collection is created for a purpose. The purpose defines the set of properties that will be associated with the collection. The properties are enforced by management policies that control the execution of procedures that are applied whenever data are ingested or accessed. The procedures generate state information that defines the outcome of enforcing the management policy. The state information can be queried to validate assessment criteria and verify that the required collection properties have been conserved. The integrated Rule-Oriented Data System implements the data management framework required to support policy-based data management. Policies are turned into computer actionable Rules. Procedures are composed from a Micro-service-oriented architecture. The result is a highly extensible and tunable system that can enforce management policies, automate administrative tasks, and periodically validate assessment criteria. Table of Contents: Introduction / Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System / iRODS Architecture / Rule-Oriented Programming / The iRODS Rule System / iRODS Micro-services / Example Rules / Extending iRODS / Appendix A: iRODS Shell Commands / Appendix B: Rulegen Grammar / Appendix C: Exercises / Author Biographies

Many information retrieval (IR) systems suffer from a radical variance in performance when responding to users' queries. Even for systems that succeed very well on average, the quality of results returned for some of the queries is poor. Thus, it is desirable that IR systems will be able to identify "difficult" queries so they can be handled properly. Understanding why some queries are inherently more difficult than others is essential for IR, and a good answer to this important question will help search engines to reduce the variance in performance, hence better servicing their customer needs. Estimating the query difficulty is an attempt to quantify the quality of search results retrieved for a query from a given collection of documents. This book discusses the reasons that cause search engines to fail for some of the queries, and then reviews recent approaches for estimating query difficulty in the IR field. It then describes a common methodology for evaluating the prediction quality of those estimators, and experiments with some of the predictors applied by various IR methods over several TREC benchmarks. Finally, it discusses potential applications that can utilize query difficulty estimators by handling each query individually and selectively, based upon its estimated difficulty. Table of Contents: Introduction - The Robustness Problem of Information Retrieval / Basic Concepts / Query Performance Prediction Methods / Pre-Retrieval Prediction Methods / Post-Retrieval Prediction Methods / Combining Predictors / A General Model for Query Difficulty / Applications of Query Difficulty Estimation / Summary and Conclusions

Information is essential to all human activity, and information in electronic form both amplifies and augments human information interactions. This lecture surveys some of the different classical meanings of information, focuses on the ways that electronic technologies are affecting how we think about these senses of information, and introduces an emerging sense of information that has implications for how we work, play, and interact with others. The evolutions of computers and electronic networks and people's uses and adaptations of these tools manifesting a dynamic space called cyberspace. Our traces of activity in cyberspace give rise to a new sense of information as instantaneous identity states that I term proflection of self. Proflections of self influence how others act toward us. Four classical senses of information are described as context for this new form of information. The four senses selected for inclusion here are the following: thought and memory, communication process,artifact, and energy. Human mental activity and state (thought and memory) have neurological, cognitive, and affective facets.The act of informing (communication process) is considered from the perspective of human intentionality and technical developments that have dramatically amplified human communication capabilities. Information artifacts comprise a common sense of information that gives rise to a variety of information industries. Energy is the most general sense of information and is considered from the point of view of physical, mental, and social state change. This sense includes information theory as a measurable reduction in uncertainty. This lecture emphasizes how electronic representations have blurred media boundaries and added computational behaviors that yield new forms of information interaction, which, in turn, are stored, aggregated, and mined to create profiles that represent our cyber identities. Table of Contents: The Many Meanings of Information / Information asThought and Memory / Information as Communication Process / Information as Artifact / Information as Energy / Information as Identity in Cyberspace: The Fifth Voice / Conclusion and Directions

We are poised at a major turning point in the history of information management via computers. Recent evolutions in computing, communications, and commerce are fundamentally reshaping the ways in which we humans interact with information, and generating enormous volumes of electronic data along the way. As a result of these forces, what will data management technologies, and their supporting software and system architectures, look like in ten years? It is difficult to say, but we can see the future taking shape now in a new generation of information access platforms that combine strategies and structures of two familiar -- and previously quite distinct -- technologies, search engines and databases, and in a new model for software applications, the Search-Based Application (SBA), which offers a pragmatic way to solve both well-known and emerging information management challenges as of now. Search engines are the world's most familiar and widely deployed information access tool, used byhundreds of millions of people every day to locate information on the Web, but few are aware they can now also be used to provide precise, multidimensional information access and analysis that is hard to distinguish from current database applications, yet endowed with the usability and massive scalability of Web search. In this book, we hope to introduce Search Based Applications to a wider audience, using real case studies to show how this flexible technology can be used to intelligently aggregate large volumes of unstructured data (like Web pages) and structured data (like database content), and to make that data available in a highly contextual, quasi real-time manner to a wide base of users for a varied range of purposes. We also hope to shed light on the general convergences underway in search and database disciplines, convergences that make SBAs possible, and which serve as harbingers of information management paradigms and technologies to come. Table of Contents: Search Based Applications / Evolving Business Information Access Needs / Origins and Histories / Data Models and Storage / Data Collection/Population / Data Processing / Data Retrieval / Data Security, Usability, Performance, Cost / Summary Evolutions and Convergences / SBA Platforms / SBA Uses and Preconditions / Anatomy of a Search Based Application / Case Study: GEFCO / Case Study: Urbanizer / Case Study: National Postal Agency / Future Directions

Knowledge Management (KM) is an effort to increase useful knowledge in the organization. It is a natural outgrowth of late twentieth century movements to make organizational management and operations more effective, of higher quality, and more responsive to constituents in a rapidly changing global environment. This document traces the evolution of KM in organizations, summarizing the most influential research and literature in the field. It also presents an overview of selected common and current practices in knowledge management, including the relationship between knowledge management and decision making, with the intention of making a case for KM as a series of processes and not necessarily a manipulation of things. The final section highlights the use of social networking and commonly adopted Web applications to increase the value of social capital and to connect practitioners with clients and colleagues. Table of Contents: Introduction / Background Bibliographic Analysis / Theorizing Knowledge in Organizations / Conceptualizing Knowledge Emergence / Knowledge "Acts" / Knowledge Management in Practice / Knowledge Management Issues / Knowledge Management and Decision Making / Social Network Analysis and KM / Implications for the Future / Conclusion

Evaluation has always played a major role in information retrieval, with the early pioneers such as Cyril Cleverdon and Gerard Salton laying the foundations for most of the evaluation methodologies in use today. The retrieval community has been extremely fortunate to have such a well-grounded evaluation paradigm during a period when most of the human language technologies were just developing. This lecture has the goal of explaining where these evaluation methodologies came from and how they have continued to adapt to the vastly changed environment in the search engine world today. The lecture starts with a discussion of the early evaluation of information retrieval systems, starting with the Cranfield testing in the early 1960s, continuing with the Lancaster "user" study for MEDLARS, and presenting the various test collection investigations by the SMART project and by groups in Britain. The emphasis in this chapter is on the how and the why of the various methodologies developed. Thesecond chapter covers the more recent "batch" evaluations, examining the methodologies used in the various open evaluation campaigns such as TREC, NTCIR (emphasis on Asian languages), CLEF (emphasis on European languages), INEX (emphasis on semi-structured data), etc. Here again the focus is on the how and why, and in particular on the evolving of the older evaluation methodologies to handle new information access techniques. This includes how the test collection techniques were modified and how the metrics were changed to better reflect operational environments. The final chapters look at evaluation issues in user studies -- the interactive part of information retrieval, including a look at the search log studies mainly done by the commercial search engines. Here the goal is to show, via case studies, how the high-level issues of experimental design affect the final evaluations. Table of Contents: Introduction and Early History / "Batch" Evaluation Since 1992 / Interactive Evaluation/ Conclusion

Search User Interfaces (SUIs) represent the gateway between people who have a task to complete, and the repositories of information and data stored around the world. Not surprisingly, therefore, there are many communities who have a vested interest in the way SUIs are designed. There are people who study how humans search for information, and people who study how humans use computers. There are people who study good user interface design, and people who design aesthetically pleasing user interfaces. There are also people who curate and manage valuable information resources, and people who design effective algorithms to retrieve results from them. While it would be easy for one community to reject another for their limited ability to design a good SUI, the truth is that they all can, and they all have made valuable contributions. Fundamentally, therefore, we must accept that designing a great SUI means leveraging the knowledge and skills from all of these communities. The aim of this book is to at least acknowledge, if not integrate, all of these perspectives to bring the reader into a multidisciplinary mindset for how we should think about SUI design. Further, this book aims to provide the reader with a framework for thinking about how different innovations each contribute to the overall design of a SUI. With this framework and a multidisciplinary perspective in hand, the book then continues by reviewing: early, successful, established, and experimental concepts for SUI design. The book then concludes by discussing how we can analyse and evaluate the on-going developments in SUI design, as this multidisciplinary area of research moves forwards. Finally, in reviewing these many SUIs and SUI features, the book finishes by extracting a series of 20 SUI design recommendations that are listed in the conclusions. Table of Contents: Introduction / Searcher-Computer Interaction / Early Search User Interfaces / Modern Search User Interfaces / Experimental Search User Interfaces / Evaluating Search User Interfaces / Conclusions

We are well into a second age of digital information. Our information is moving from the desktop to the laptop to the "palmtop" and up into an amorphous cloud on the Web. How can one manage both the challenges and opportunities of this new world of digital information? What does the future hold? This book provides an important update on the rapidly expanding field of personal information management (PIM). Part I (Always and Forever) introduces the essentials of PIM. Information is personal for many reasons. It's the information on our hard drives we couldn't bear to lose. It's the information about us that we don't want to share. It's the distracting information demanding our attention even as we try to do something else. It's the information we don't know about but need to. Through PIM, we control personal information. We integrate information into our lives in useful ways. We make it "ours." With basics established, Part I proceeds to explore a critical interplay between personal information "always" at hand through mobile devices and "forever" on the Web. How does information stay "ours" in such a world? Part II (Building Places of Our Own for Digital Information) will be available in the Summer of 2012, and will consist of the following chapters: Chapter 5. Technologies to eliminate PIM?: We have seen astonishing advances in the technologies of information management -- in particular, to aid in the storing, structuring and searching of information. These technologies will certainly change the way we do PIM; will they eliminate the need for PIM altogether? Chapter 6. GIM and the social fabric of PIM: We don't (and shouldn't) manage our information in isolation. Group information management (GIM) -- especially the kind practiced more informally in households and smaller project teams -- goes hand in glove with good PIM. Chapter 7. PIM by design: Methodologies, principles, questions and considerations as we seek to understand PIM better and to build PIM into our tools, techniques and training. Chapter 8. To each of us, our own.: Just as we must each be a student of our own practice of PIM, we must also be a designer of this practice. This concluding chapter looks at tips, traps and tradeoffs as we work to build a practice of PIM and "places" of our own for personal information. Table of Contents: A New Age of Information / The Basics of PIM / Our Information, Always at Hand / Our Information, Forever on the Web

In 1991, a group of researchers chose the term digital libraries to describe an emerging field of research, development, and practice. Since then, Virginia Tech has had funded research in this area, largely through its Digital Library Research Laboratory. This book is the first in a four book series that reports our key findings and current research investigations. Underlying this book series are six completed dissertations (Gonçalves, Kozievitch, Leidig, Murthy, Shen, Torres), eight dissertations underway, and many masters theses. These reflect our experience with a long string of prototype or production systems developed in the lab, such as CITIDEL, CODER, CTRnet, Ensemble, ETANA, ETD-db, MARIAN, and Open Digital Libraries. There are hundreds of related publications, presentations, tutorials, and reports. We have built upon that work so this book, and the others in the series, will address digital library related needs in many computer science, information science, and library science (e.g., LIS) courses, as well as the requirements of researchers, developers, and practitioners. Much of the early work in the digital library field struck a balance between addressing real-world needs, integrating methods from related areas, and advancing an ever-expanding research agenda. Our work has fit in with these trends, but simultaneously has been driven by a desire to provide a firm conceptual and formal basis for the field.Our aim has been to move from engineering to science. We claim that our 5S (Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Structures, Streams) framework, discussed in publications dating back to at least 1998, provides a suitable basis. This book introduces 5S, and the key theoretical and formal aspects of the 5S framework. While the 5S framework may be used to describe many types of information systems, and is likely to have even broader utility and appeal, we focus here on digital libraries. Our view of digital libraries is broad, so further generalization should be straightforward. We have connected with related fields, including hypertext/hypermedia, information storage and retrieval, knowledge management, machine learning, multimedia, personal information management, and Web 2.0. Applications have included managing not only publications, but also archaeological information, educational resources, fish images, scientific datasets, and scientific experiments/ simulations. Table of Contents: Introduction / Exploration / Mathematical Preliminaries / Minimal Digital Library / Archaeological Digital Libraries / 5S Results: Lemmas, Proofs, and 5SSuite / Glossary / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / Index

The Answer Machine is a practical, non-technical guide to the technologies behind information seeking and analysis. It introduces search and content analytics to software buyers, knowledge managers, and searchers who want to understand and design effective online environments. The book describes how search evolved from an expert-only to an end user tool. It provides an overview of search engines, categorization and clustering, natural language processing, content analytics, and visualization technologies. Detailed profiles for Web search, eCommerce search, eDiscovery, and enterprise search contrast the types of users, uses, tasks, technologies, and interaction designs for each. These variables shape each application, although the underlying technologies are the same. Types of information tasks and the trade-offs between precision and recall, time, volume and precision, and privacy vs. personalization are discussed within this context. The book examines trends toward convenient, context-aware computing, big data and analytics technologies, conversational systems, and answer machines. The Answer Machine explores IBM Watson's DeepQA technology and describes how it is used to answer health care and Jeopardy questions. The book concludes by discussing the implications of these advances: how they will change the way we run our businesses, practice medicine, govern, or conduct our lives in the digital age. Table of Contents: Introduction / The Query Process and Barriers to Finding Information Online / Online Search: An Evolution / Search and Discovery Technologies: An Overview / Information Access: A Spectrum of Needs and Uses / Future Tense: The Next Era in Information Access and Discovery / Answer Machines

Visual information retrieval (VIR) is an active and vibrant research area, which attempts at providing means for organizing, indexing, annotating, and retrieving visual information (images and videos) from large, unstructured repositories.The goal of VIR is to retrieve matches ranked by their relevance to a given query, which is often expressed as an example image and/or a series of keywords. During its early years (1995-2000), the research efforts were dominated by content-based approaches contributed primarily by the image and video processing community. During the past decade, it was widely recognized that the challenges imposed by the lack of coincidence between an image's visual contents and its semantic interpretation, also known as semantic gap, required a clever use of textual metadata (in addition to information extracted from the image's pixel contents) to make image and video retrieval solutions efficient and effective. The need to bridge (or at least narrow) the semantic gap has been one of the driving forces behind current VIR research. Additionally, other related research problems and market opportunities have started to emerge, offering a broad range of exciting problems for computer scientists and engineers to work on.In this introductory book, we focus on a subset of VIR problems where the media consists of images, and the indexing and retrieval methods are based on the pixel contents of those images -- an approach known as content-based image retrieval (CBIR). We present an implementation-oriented overview of CBIR concepts, techniques, algorithms, and figures of merit. Most chapters are supported by examples written in Java, using Lucene (an open-source Java-based indexing and search implementation) and LIRE (Lucene Image REtrieval), an open-source Java-based library for CBIR.Table of Contents: Introduction / Information Retrieval: Selected Concepts and Techniques / Visual Features / Indexing Visual Features / LIRE: An Extensible Java CBIR Library / Concluding Remarks

This is the second book based on the 5S (Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Structures, Streams) approach to digital libraries (DLs). Leveraging the first volume, on Theoretical Foundations, we focus on the key issues of evaluation and integration. These cross-cutting issues serve as a bridge for those interested in DLs, connecting the introduction and formal discussion in the first book, with the coverage of key technologies in the third book, and of illustrative applications in the fourth book. These two topics have central importance in the DL field, allowing it to be treated scientifically as well as practically. In the scholarly world, we only really understand something if we know how to measure and evaluate it. In the Internet era of distributed information systems, we only can be practical at scale if we integrate across both systems and their associated content. Evaluation of DLs must take place atmultiple levels,so we can address the different entities and their associated measures. Thus, for digital objects, we assess accessibility, pertinence, preservability, relevance, significance, similarity, and timeliness. Other measures are specific to higher-level constructs like metadata, collections, catalogs, repositories, and services.We tie these together through a case study of the 5SQual tool, which we designed and implemented to perform an automatic quantitative evaluation of DLs. Thus, across the Information Life Cycle, we describe metrics and software useful to assess the quality of DLs, and demonstrate utility with regard to representative application areas: archaeology and education. Though integration has been a challenge since the earliest work on DLs, we provide the first comprehensive 5S-based formal description of the DL integration problem, cast in the context of related work. Since archaeology is a fundamentally distributed enterprise, we describe ETANADL, for integrating Near Eastern Archeology sites and information. Thus, we show how 5S-based modeling can lead to integrated services and content. While the first book adopts a minimalist and formal approach to DLs, and provides a systematic and functional method to design and implement DL exploring services, here we broaden to practical DLs with richer metamodels, demonstrating the power of 5S for integration and evaluation.

Digital libraries (DLs) have evolved since their launch in 1991 into an important type of information system, with widespread application. This volume advances that trend further by describing new research and development in the DL field that builds upon the 5S (Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Structures, Streams) framework, which is discussed in three other DL volumes in this series.While the 5S framework may be used to describe many types of information systems, and is likely to have even broader utility and appeal, we focus here on digital libraries. Drawing upon six (Akbar, Kozievitch, Leidig, Li, Murthy, Park) completed and two (Chen, Fouh) in-process dissertations, as well as the efforts of collaborating researchers, and scores of related publications, presentations, tutorials, and reports, this book demonstrates the applicability of 5S in five digital library application areas, that also have importance in the context of the WWW, Web 2.0, and innovative information systems. By integrating surveys of the state-of-the-art, newresearch, connections with formalization, case studies, and exercises/projects, this book can serve as a textbook for those interested in computing, information, and/or library science. Chapter 1 focuses on images, explaining how they connect with information retrieval, in the context of CBIR systems. Chapter 2 gives two case studies of DLs used in education, which is one of the most common applications of digital libraries. Chapter 3 covers social networks, which are at the heart of work onWeb 2.0, explaining the construction and use of deduced graphs, that can enhance retrieval and recommendation. Chapter 4 demonstrates the value of DLs in eScience, focusing, in particular, on cyber-infrastructure for simulation. Chapter 5 surveys geospatial information in DLs, with a case study on geocoding. Given this rich content, we trust that any interested in digital libraries, or in related systems, will find this volume to be motivating, intellectually satisfying, and useful. We hope it will help move digital libraries forward into a science as well as a practice. We hope it will help build community that will address the needs of the next generation of DLs.

Digital libraries (DLs) have introduced new technologies, as well as leveraging, enhancing, and integrating related technologies, since the early 1990s. These efforts have been enriched through a formal approach, e.g., the 5S (Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Structures, Streams) framework, which is discussed in two earlier volumes in this series. This volume should help advance work not only in DLs, but also in the WWW and other information systems. Drawing upon four (Kozievitch, Murthy, Park, Yang) completed and three (Elsherbiny, Farag, Srinivasan) in-process dissertations, as well as the efforts of collaborating researchers and scores of related publications, presentations, tutorials, and reports, this book should advance the DL field with regard to at least six key technologies. By integrating surveys of the state-of-the-art, new research, connections with formalization, case studies, and exercises/projects, this book can serve as a computing or information science textbook. It can support studies in cyber-security, document management, hypertext/hypermedia, IR, knowledge management, LIS, multimedia, and machine learning. Chapter 1, with a case study on fingerprint collections, focuses on complex (composite, compound) objects, connecting DL and related work on buckets, DCC, and OAI-ORE. Chapter 2, discussing annotations, as in hypertext/hypermedia, emphasizes parts of documents, including images as well as text, managing superimposed information. The SuperIDR system, and prototype efforts with Flickr, should motivate further development and standardization related to annotation, which would benefit all DL and WWW users. Chapter 3, on ontologies, explains how they help with browsing, query expansion, focused crawling, and classification. This chapter connects DLs with the Semantic Web, and uses CTRnet as an example. Chapter 4, on (hierarchical) classification, leverages LIS theory, as well as machine learning, and is important for DLs as well as the WWW. Chapter 5,on extraction from text, covers document segmentation, as well as how to construct a database from heterogeneous collections of references (from ETDs); i.e., converting strings to canonical forms. Chapter 6 surveys the security approaches used in information systems, and explains how those approaches can apply to digital libraries which are not fully open. Given this rich content, those interested in DLs will be able to find solutions to key problems, using the right technologies and methods. We hope this book will help show how formal approaches can enhance the development of suitable technologies and how they can be better integrated with DLs and other information systems.

Searching the Internet and the ability to competently use search engines are increasingly becoming an important part of children’s daily lives. Whether mobile or at home, children use search interfaces to explore personal interests, complete academic assignments, and have social interaction. However, engaging with search also means engaging with an ever-changing and evolving search landscape. There are continual software updates, multiple devices used to search (e.g., phones, tablets), an increasing use of social media, and constantly updated Internet content. For young searchers, this can require infinite adaptability or mean being hopelessly confused. This book offers a perspective centered on children’s search experiences as a whole instead of thinking of search as a process with separate and potentially problematic steps. Reading the prior literature with a child-centered view of search reveals that children have been remarkably consistent over time as searchers, displaying the same search strategies regardless of the landscape of search. However, no research has synthesized these consistent patterns in children’s search across the literature, and only recently have these patterns been uncovered as distinct search roles, or searcher types. Based on a four-year longitudinal study on children’s search experiences, this book weaves together the disparate evidence in the literature through the use of 9 search roles for children ages 7-15. The search role framework has a distinct advantage because it encourages adult stakeholders to design children’s search tools to support and educate children at their existing levels of search strength and deficit, rather than expecting children to adapt to a transient search landscape.

This is the first volume in a series about creating and maintaining taxonomies and their practical applications, especially in search functions. In Book 1 (The Taxobook: History, Theories, and Concepts of Knowledge Organization), the author introduces the very foundations of classification, starting with the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, as well as Theophrastus and the Roman Pliny the Elder. They were first in a line of distinguished thinkers and philosophers to ponder the organization of the world around them and attempt to apply a structure or framework to that world. The author continues by discussing the works and theories of several other philosophers from Medieval and Renaissance times, including Saints Aquinas and Augustine, William of Occam, Andrea Cesalpino, Carl Linnaeus, and René Descartes. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, James Frederick Ferrier, Charles Ammi Cutter, and Melvil Dewey contributed greatly to the theories of classification systems and knowledge organization. Cutter and Dewey, especially, created systems that are still in use today. Chapter 8 covers the contributions of Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan, who is considered by many to be the “father of modern library science.” He created the concept of faceted vocabularies, which are widely used—even if they are not well understood—on many e-commerce websites. Following the discussions and historical review, the author has included a glossary that covers all three books of this series so that it can be referenced as you work your way through the second and third volumes. The author believes that it is important to understand the history of knowledge organization and the differing viewpoints of various philosophers—even if that understanding is only that the differing viewpoints simply exist. Knowing the differing viewpoints will help answer the fundamental questions: Why do we want to build taxonomies? How do we build them to serve multiple pointsof view? Table of Contents: List of Figures / Preface / Acknowledgments / Origins of Knowledge Organization Theory: Early Philosophy of Knowledge / Saints and Traits: Realism and Nominalism / Arranging the glowers… and the Birds, and the Insects, and Everything Else: Early Naturalists and Taxonomies / The Age of Enlightenment Impacts Knowledge Theory / 18th-Century Developments: Knowledge Theory Coming to the Foreground / High Resolution: Classification Sharpens in the 19th and 20th Centuries / Outlining the World and Its Parts / Facets: An Indian Mathematician and Children’s Toys at Selfridge’s / Points of Knowledge / Glossary / End Notes / Author Biography