Magnet: supporting navigation in semistructured data environments

ABSTRACT

With the growing importance of systems containing arbitrary semi-structured relationships, the need for supporting users searching in such repositories has grown. Currently support for users' search needs either has required domain-specific user interfaces or has required users to be schema experts. We have developed a general-purpose tool that offers users helpful navigation and refinement options for seeking information in these semistructured repositories. We show how a tool can be built without requiring domain-specific assumptions about the information being explored. In addition to describing a general approach to the problem, we provide a set of natural, general-purpose refinement tactics, many generalized from past work on textual information retrieval.

REFERENCES

• 1: Marcia J. Bates. Information search tactics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 30(4):205--214, 1979.
• 2: Marcia J. Bates. The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the online search interface. Online Review, 13(5):407--424, October 1989.
• 3: Marcia J. Bates, Where should the person stop and the information search interface start?, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.26 n.5, p.575-591, 1990 [doi>10.1016/0306-4573(90)90103-9]
• 4: David Carmel , Yoelle S. Maarek , Matan Mandelbrod , Yosi Mass , Aya Soffer, Searching XML documents via XML fragments, Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, July 28-August 01, 2003, Toronto, Canada [doi>10.1145/860435.860464]
• 5: Tiziana Catarci, Maria Francesca Costabile, Stefano Levialdi, and Carlo Batini. Visual query systems for databases: A survey. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, 8(2):215--260, 1997.
• 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: Daniel Egnor and Robert Lord. Structured information retrieval using XML. In Working Notes of the ACM SIGIR Workshop on XML and Information Retrieval, 2000.
• 8: User Interface Engineering. Users don't learn to search better. http://www.uie.com/Articles/not_learn_search.htm.
• 9: Norbert Fuhr, Mounia Lalmas, and Saadia Malik, editors. INitiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX). Proceedings of the Second INEX Workshop, December 2003.
• 10: George W. Furnas , Samuel J. Rauch, Considerations for information environments and the NaviQue workspace, Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Digital libraries, p.79-88, June 23-26, 1998, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/276675.276684]
• 11: Roy Goldman , Jennifer Widom, Interactive Query and Search in Semistructured Databases, Selected papers from the International Workshop on The World Wide Web and Databases, p.52-62, March 27-28, 1998
• 12: Donna Harman, Ranking algorithms, Information retrieval: data structures and algorithms, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1992
• 13: Donna Harman, Relevance feedback and other query modification techniques, Information retrieval: data structures and algorithms, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1992
• 14: Haystack. The universal information client. http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/.
• 15: The Apache Software Foundation Jakatra Project. The Lucene search engine. http://www.lucene.com/.
• 16: Susanne Jul , George W. Furnas, Navigation in electronic worlds: a CHI 97 workshop, ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, v.29 n.4, p.44-49, Oct. 1997 [doi>10.1145/270950.270979]
• 17: Jaap Kamps , Maarten Marx , Maarten de Rijke , Börkur Sigurbjörnsson, XML retrieval: what to retrieve?, Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, July 28-August 01, 2003, Toronto, Canada [doi>10.1145/860435.860525]
• 18: O. Lassila and R. Swick. Resource description framework (RDF): Model and syntax specification. http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222, February 1999. W3C Recommendation.
• 19: Jason McHugh , Serge Abiteboul , Roy Goldman , Dallas Quass , Jennifer Widom, Lore: a database management system for semistructured data, ACM SIGMOD Record, v.26 n.3, p.54-66, Sept. 1997 [doi>10.1145/262762.262770]
• 20: Penny Nii, The blackboard model of problem solving, AI Magazine, v.7 n.2, p.38-53, Summer 1986
• 21: Donald A. Norman, Design rules based on analyses of human error, Communications of the ACM, v.26 n.4, p.254-258, April 1983 [doi>10.1145/2163.358092]
• 22: Peter Pirolli , Stuart Card, Information foraging in information access environments, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.51-58, May 07-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado, United States [doi>10.1145/223904.223911]
• 23: The Simile Project. Longwell suit of web-based RDF browsers. http://simile.mit.edu/longwell/.
• 24: Jason D. M. Rennie, Lawrence Shih, Jaime Teevan, and David R. Karger. Tackling the poor assumptions of naive bayes text classifiers. In Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Machine Learning, 2003.
• 25: Jaime Teevan , Christine Alvarado , Mark S. Ackerman , David R. Karger, The perfect search engine is not enough: a study of orienteering behavior in directed search, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.415-422, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985745]
• 26: Agathoniki Trigoni, Interactive Query Formulation in Semistructured Databases, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, p.356-369, October 27-29, 2002
• 27: Bienvenido Vélez , Ron Weiss , Mark A. Sheldon , David K. Gifford, Fast and effective query refinement, Proceedings of the 20th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.6-15, July 27-31, 1997, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
• 28: Ka-Ping Yee , Kirsten Swearingen , Kevin Li , Marti Hearst, Faceted metadata for image search and browsing, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/642611.642681]
• 29: Franois Yergeau, Tim Bray, Jean Paoli, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, and Eve Maler. Extensible markup language (XML). http: //www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/, February 2004. W3C Recommendation.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications

Keywords:
information retrieval, metadata, navigation, searching/browsing, semistructured data