Theory and practice in visual interfaces for semi-structured document discovery and selection

Abstract

With the increase in electronic publications, and indeed the availability of existing publications in digital form, as well as the encouragement of open access publication, comes a challenge. That challenge is to create assistive software to aid in the discovery and selection of relevant documents to one's information need. Visual interfaces have begun to address the need of information seekers in finding publications and wading through the large result sets that are returned from search engines. There is currently, little evidence to suggest that these interfaces are based on systematic research on requirements. In this article, we examine areas which contribute to the theory and practice of visual interfaces directly relating to the discovery and selection of publications. We bring together work from different fields in a targeted approach to assist the future creation of these interfaces.

Interfaces for Searching and Triaging Large Document Sets: An Ontology-Supported Visual Analytics Approach

“…For this to occur, existing research [23][24][25] suggests that, while still able to assess document relevance to information-seeking objectives, tools must allow users to encounter and perform rapid triaging on large sets of documents in a non-linear fashion. Notably, supporting information triage within tools can also help users assess the quality of their search and triage tasks and inform them on how to improve further information seeking [26].…”

“…Poorly designed interfaces typically attempt to hide their scaling weaknesses by paging away large percentages of their results, implementing smooth scrolling interactions, or worse, by showing only the first result in an attempt to avoid triaging altogether. Yet, tools cannot ignore information triage, as it is critical in helping users assess the quality of search results [26]. An example of a tool that forces a linear inspection of document results within a paged system is PubMed (see Figure 3 for a scenario where a search is performed on the MEDLINE document set for "heart".…”

“…1 The design of low-level triage interfaces can be challenging. Namely, designers must consider the characteristics of the information to be represented, the knowledge domain of users, the task to be performed, and the interactions that can effectively support the former [26,28,67]. When designing document displays, it is important that any summarization, weighting, and filtering techniques highlight attributes that best assist in the application of domain expertise for relevance judgement.…”