Spatial Hypertext for Digital Library Users

George Buchanan, Ann Blandford, Matt Jones, Harold Thimbleby

Interaction Design CentreMiddlesex University

London

History Lessons

• Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat its mistakes

Economics• Users don’t want to do any extra work

– however, they are happy to get extra benefits “for free”

– e.g. Amazon’s customer profiling

Information Seeking

• Wider process than “vanilla” Information Retrieval– Information need formulation– Search formulation– “IR”– Document review and selection– Information need reformulation

• Highly iterative / Internally complex

Spatial Hypertext• Direct manipulation• Document shown as a graphical item • Uses visual cues (e.g. colour. shape) to

suggest a document’s role, type, age...• Articulates uncertain and/or provisional

nature of document groupings• Documents can be grouped

– By proximity etc. or by hierarchy

Spatial Hypertext “State of Play”

• Positive outcomes to user studies– For supporting decision argumentation– For supporting information triage

• Often loosely (if at all) connected to information systems– Search behaviours are poorly defined– Hard versus soft behaviours not well

understood

Spatial Parsing

• Introduced by Shipman in 1995• Not a lexical parser• Lexical = fixed syntax->extract words

from a stream->find semantics• Spatial = unknown syntax->extract

patterns from a space->process patterns to find semantics

Garnet

• Spatial Hypertext for Digital Libraries• Connects to the Greenstone DL using

the Greenstone/CORBA protocol• Similar to VIKI

GarnetSpatial Parsing

• Currently has a simple (proximity) spatial parser

• Connects to a clustering system– Gives a cluster profile for every pattern

found– Incoherent patterns are ignored– Small patterns are ignored

• Double-click on label = open in browser

GarnetSpatial Parsing

• A search result can be “scattered”– Placing search result labels next to groups of

similar documents– A document may appear next to no, one or

many groups– Search result list appears as usual

• Using user organisation of material to predict the role of future candidate documents

Garnet - Search

• You can drag from search results to workspace

• Items can be deleted from search results

• Keeps a history

Garnet - User Issues

• Common metaphors seem inconsistent– e.g. “deleting” a document; blacklisting

versus returning• User control versus automatic action• Scattering

– Is it useful? Is the quality right?– representation of certainty– positioning

Conclusion

• A lot of work to be done• Far more questions than answers• User evaluation needed• Speed/space concerns with spatial

parser