What to do when there's too much information

ABSTRACT

Hypertext systems with small units of text are likely to drown the user with information, in the same way that online catalogs or bibliographic retrieval systems often do. Experiments with a catalog of 800,000 book citations have shown two useful ways of dealing with the “too many hits” problem. One is a display of phrases containing the excessively frequent words; another is a display of titles by hierarchical category. The same techniques should apply to other text-based retrieval systems. In general, interactive solutions seem more promising than attempts to do detailed query analysis and get things right the first time.

REFERENCES

• Fris88: Mark,E. Frisse, Searching for information in a hypertext medical handbook, Communications of the ACM, v.31 n.7, p.880-886, July 1988 [doi>10.1145/48511.48518]
• Gell83: V. J. Geller , M. E. Lesk, User interfaces to information systems: choices vs. commands, Proceedings of the 6th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, June 06-08, 1983, Bethesda, Maryland
• Hala88: Frank,G. Halasz, Reflections on NoteCards: seven issues for the next generation of hypermedia systems, Communications of the ACM, v.31 n.7, p.836-852, July 1988 [doi>10.1145/48511.48514]
• Lesk88: Michael Lesk, "Word Manipulation in Online Catalog Searching: Using the Unix System for Library Experiments," Proc. 1988 EUUG Meeting, London, England, April 1988.
• Rijs79: C. J. Van Rijsbergen, Information Retrieval, Butterworth-Heinemann, Newton, MA, 1979
• Balt83: Gerard Salton , Michael J. McGill, Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval, McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, NY, 1986

INDEX TERMS

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

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

General Terms:
Design, Management