Query Refinement is an essential information retrieval tool that interactively recommends new terms related to a particular query. This paper introduces concept recall, an experimental measure of an algorithm's ability to suggest terms humans have judged to be semantically related to an information need. This study uses precision improvement experiments to measure the ability of an algorithm to produce single term query modifications that predict a user's information need as partially encoded by the query. An omcie algorithm produces ideal query modifications, providing a meaningful context for interpreting precision improvement results.This study also introduces RMAP, a fast and practical query refinement algorithm that refines multiple term queries by dynamically combining precomputed suggestions for single term queries. RMAP achieves accuracy comparable to a much slower algorithm, although both RMAP and the slower algorithm lag behind the best possible term suggestions offered by the oracle. We believe RMAP is fast enough to be integrated into present day Internet search engines: RMAP computes 100 term suggestions for a 160,000 document collection in 15 ms on a low-end PC.
In this paper we describe the design of the TerraScope Image Navigator (TIN), the graphical user interface module of the TerraScope system. TerraScope is an earth science data middleware system that was designed to facilitate collaboration among a set of data repositories (peers) who wish to provide their geospatial data thru an integrated portal. The base of the system is a distributed database that collects heterogeneous spatial data taken from satellite ground stations. TIN, as a component of TerraScope, retrieves images and related information from the distributed database and deals with the effective presentation of this kind of data to the user. TIN allows recursive navigation of the image space by dynamically embedding retrieved sub images as spatial hyperlinks inside other retrieved images. The TIN prototype was implemented using an interactive movie authoring environment (Flash MX) and XML (eXtensible Markup Language) to communicate queries and retrieve data and metadata from the server. As a result, we expect to port TIN to multiple platforms, including portable devices, with relative ease. Measurements using a small image database suggest result set rendering times in the order of a few seconds and response time 97% dominated by server computation.
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