(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1995)
Veerasamy, Aravindan; Hudson, Scott E.; Navathe, Shamkant B.
We describe the design of an User Interface for a ranked output Information Retrieval system that integrates querying, navigation and visualization in a seamless fashion. Highlights of the system include the following:
-- Using a visualization scheme, the interface provides visual feedback to the user about how the query words influence the ranking of retrieved documents.
-- By simple drag-and-drop operations of objects on the screen, the interface facilitates a naive end-user in constructing complex structured queries and in providing relevance feedback.
-- To suit the evolving information needs of the user, the interface supports navigational features such as browsing documents by specific authors and browsing the Table of Contents of publications.
-- The interface integrates an online thesaurus which provides words related to the query that can be used by the user to expand the original query.
By providing a rich set of features, the interface coherently supports a wide spectrum of information gathering tactics for different classes of users.