Integrating information seeking and structuring: exploring the role of spatial hypertext in a digital library

ABSTRACT

This paper presents Garnet, a novel spatial hypertext interface to a digital library. Garnet supports both information structuring - via spatial hypertext - and traditional information seeking - via a digital library. A user study of Garnet is reported, together with an analysis of how the organizing work done by users in a spatial hypertext workspace could support later information seeking. The use of Garnet during the study is related to both digital library and spatial hypertext research. Spatial hypertexts support the detection of implicit document groups in a user's workspace. The study also investigates the degree of similarity found in the full text of documents within such document groups.

REFERENCES

• 1: David Bainbridge , George Buchanan , John McPherson , Steve Jones , Abdelaziz Mahoui , Ian H. Witten, Greenstone: A Platform for Distributed Digital Library Applications, Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, p.137-148, September 04-09, 2001
• 2: Sergey Brin , Lawrence Page, The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine, Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web 7, p.107-117, April 1998, Brisbane, Australia
• 3: George Buchanan , Matt Jones , Gary Marsden, Exploring Small Screen Digital Library Access with the Greenstone Digital Library, Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, p.583-596, September 16-18, 2002
• 4: Buchanan, G., Blandford, A., Thimbleby, H., Jones, M., "Integrating information seeking and structuring: exploring the role of spatial hypertexts in a Digital Library", Proceedings of the European Conference on Digital Libraries, 2004, in press.
• 5: Steve B. Cousins , Andreas Paepcke , Terry Winograd , Eric A. Bier , Ken Pier, The digital library integrated task environment (DLITE), Proceedings of the second ACM international conference on Digital libraries, p.142-151, July 23-26, 1997, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/263690.263807]
• 6: Douglass R. Cutting , David R. Karger , Jan O. Pedersen , John W. Tukey, Scatter/Gather: a cluster-based approach to browsing large document collections, Proceedings of the 15th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.318-329, June 21-24, 1992, Copenhagen, Denmark [doi>10.1145/133160.133214]
• 7: Ellis, D., "Modelling the information seeking patterns of engineers and research scientists in an industrial environment", Journal of Documentation 53(4):pp.384--403, 1997.
• 8: David Gibson , Jon Kleinberg , Prabhakar Raghavan, Inferring Web communities from link topology, Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia : links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems: links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems, p.225-234, June 20-24, 1998, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/276627.276652]
• 9: Marti A. Hearst , Jan O. Pedersen, Reexamining the cluster hypothesis: scatter/gather on retrieval results, Proceedings of the 19th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.76-84, August 18-22, 1996, Zurich, Switzerland [doi>10.1145/243199.243216]
• 10: David G. Hendry , David J. Harper, An informal information-seeking environment, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, v.48 n.11, p.1036-1048, Nov. 1997 [doi>10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199711)48:11<1036::AID-ASI6>3.3.CO;2-E]
• 11: Alison Kidd, The marks are on the knowledge worker, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: celebrating interdependence, p.186-191, April 24-28, 1994, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/191666.191740]
• 12: Kuhlthau, C. C., "Seeking Meaning: a process approach to library and information services" Ablex Publishing, Norwood, New Jersey, 1992.
• 13: Thomas W. Malone, How do people organize their desks?: Implications for the design of office information systems, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.1 n.1, p.99-112, Jan. 1983 [doi>10.1145/357423.357430]
• 14: Catherine C. Marshall , Frank M. Shipman, III , James H. Coombs, VIKI: spatial hypertext supporting emergent structure, Proceedings of the 1994 ACM European conference on Hypermedia technology, p.13-23, September 19-23, 1994, Edinburgh, Scotland [doi>10.1145/192757.192759]
• 15: Catherine C. Marshall , Frank M. Shipman, III, Spatial hypertext and the practice of information triage, Proceedings of the eighth ACM conference on Hypertext, p.124-133, April 06-11, 1997, Southampton, United Kingdom [doi>10.1145/267437.267451]
• 16: Vicki L. O'Day , Robin Jeffries, Orienteering in an information landscape: how information seekers get from here to there, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.438-445, April 24-29, 1993, Amsterdam, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/169059.169365]
• 17: Frank M. Shipman, III , Catherine C. Marshall , Thomas P. Moran, Finding and using implicit structure in human-organized spatial layouts of information, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.346-353, May 07-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado, United States [doi>10.1145/223904.223949]
• 18: Shipman, F.: "Seven Directions for Spatial Hypertext Research", First International Workshop on Spatial Hypertext, ACM Hypertext Conference 2001, Aarhus, Denmark, 2001. Online at: http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~shipman/SpatialHypertext/SH1/shipman.pdf
• 19: Frank Shipman , J. Michael Moore , Preetam Maloor , Haowei Hsieh , Raghu Akkapeddi, Semantics happen: knowledge building in spatial hypertext, Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, June 11-15, 2002, College Park, Maryland, USA [doi>10.1145/513338.513350]
• 20: Ian H. Witten , Stefan J. Boddie , David Bainbridge , Rodger J. McNab, Greenstone: a comprehensive open-source digital library software system, Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on Digital libraries, p.113-121, June 02-07, 2000, San Antonio, Texas, United States [doi>10.1145/336597.336650]
• 21: Zamir, O., Etzioni, O., Mandani, O. and Karp, R. M. "Fast and Intuitive Clustering of Web Documents". Third International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, AAAI Press, Menlo Park, California. pp. 287--290, 1997.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia
          Subjects: User issues

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
digital libraries, information retrieval, spatial hypertext