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

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

Digital reference is a deceptively simple concept on its face: "the incorporation of human expertise into the information system." 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.

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.

/ Information Retrieval / Faceted Information Retrieval / II. Research and Practice / Academic Research / Commercial Applications / III. Practical Concerns / Back-End Concerns / Front-End Concerns / Conclusion / Glossary

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.

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. Table of Contents: Preface / Figure Credits / Introduction / Reading / Interaction / Reading as a Social Activity / Studying Reading / Beyond the Book / References / Author Biography

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; / Basic Multimedia Search Technologies / Content-based Retrieval in Depth / Added Services / Multimedia Information Retrieval Research / Summary

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.

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

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

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

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.

There are people who study good user interface design, and people who design aesthetically pleasing user interfaces. Table of Contents: Introduction / Searcher-Computer Interaction / Early Search User Interfaces / Modern Search User Interfaces / Experimental Search User Interfaces / Evaluating Search User Interfaces / Conclusions

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. Table of Contents: A New Age of Information / The Basics of PIM / Our Information, Always at Hand / Our Information, Forever on the Web

Table of Contents: Introduction / Exploration / Mathematical Preliminaries / Minimal Digital Library / Archaeological Digital Libraries / 5S Results: Lemmas, Proofs, and 5SSuite / Glossary / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / Index

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.

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.

Digital libraries (DLs) have introduced new technologies, as well as leveraging, enhancing, and integrating related technologies, since the early 1990s. 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.

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

Table of Contents: List of Figures / Preface / Acknowledgments / Building a Case for Building a Taxonomy / Taxonomy Basics / Getting Started / Terms: The Building Blocks of a Taxonomy / Building the Structure of Your Taxonomy / Evaluation and Maintenance / Standards and Taxonomies / Glossary / End Notes / Author Biography