Visualizing%20Search%20Results%20from%20Metadata-Enabled

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Visualizing Search Results from
Metadata-Enabled Repositories in Cultural Domains
Lynne C. Howarth Thea Miller
University of Toronto
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The project

• project start May 2003, follow-up to earlier
  project Modelling a Metalevel Ontology
• principal investigator Lynne C.Howarth
• research assistants

doctoral Thea Miller masters Christopher
Cronin, Christine Dumovich, Julie Hannaford,
Annie Ng, Suzan Poyraz, Alison Sterling

• funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities
  Research Council of Canada (SSHRC SRG
  410-03-1413)

TMRA '05, Leipzig, 7 October 2005
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Metadata-enabled cultural repositories the
situation

• need for systems that obviate the requirement of
  understanding underlying metadata structures and
  tagging (Buckland et al., 1999)
• current research focus in metadata arena has
  tended to be on syntax -- less focus on semantics
• while cross-schema crosswalks have been
  developed, cross-domain search tools have not

TMRA '05, Leipzig, 7 October 2005
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Research objectives
Building on previous research (Howarth, Cronin,
Hannaford, 2002 2003 Howarth 2004), the goal is
to develop and refine a common set of labelled
categories to serve as a natural language
"gateway" to metadata-enabled resources,
enhancing

• semantic interoperability
• language interoperability
• multilingual access
• cross-domain searching

TMRA '05, Leipzig, 7 October 2005
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Cognitive model
3. Understanding / contextualisation phase
user interpretation of results, facilitated
by topic map
2. Orientation / sense-making phase
user sorts results according to categories
1. Perceptual phase
results from repository/-ies are presented to
the user
TMRA '05, Leipzig, 7 October 2005
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Orientation/sense-making the 17 common categories

• Contact Information Information on how to
  communicate witth someone about a work, i.e.,
  names, phone numbers, etc.
• Date Time Period Dates associated with a work,
  as well as time period information regarding a
  work's content.
• Edition Information on a work's version.
• Genre / Type The nature or style of a work's
  intellectual content.
• Identifiers Unique names or numbers assigned to
  a work so that it can be distinguished from
  others, for example, its ISBN.
• Language The language or dialect of a work.
• Methodology The procedures / techniques used to
  make or change a work.
• Names Names of individuals or organizations
  associated with a work, such as creators,
  publishers, sponsors, etc.
• Physical format The physical appearance of a
  work.

TMRA '05, Leipzig, 7 October 2005
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Orientation/sense-making the 17 common
categories (continued)

• Place Locations associated with a work, for
  example, where a work was created, published, is
  housed, etc.
• Rights Restrictions on Use Legal limitations /
  rules that affect how you can use a work after
  you have been given access to it.
• Roles The function of an individual or
  organization associated with a work.
• Sources, References Related Works Other works
  that are related to the work you are seeking or
  were used to develop the work you are looking
  for.
• Subject The topic of a work its intellectual
  content.
• Summary Description Details about a work that
  illustrate its main points.
• Terms of Access Availability The legal
  limitations / rules that affect your ability to
  access a work. This relates to privacy or
  intellectual property concerns.
• Title The name or phrase assigned to a work for
  identification purposes.

TMRA '05, Leipzig, 7 October 2005
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Focus group testing

• potential clarity and utility of labeled
  categories tested using quantitative (assigned
  activities) and qualitative (focus group
  discussions) approaches
• categorization exercises - purpose
• resolve any semantic ambiguities (fuzzy terms
  that defied ready assignment to any one category)
• refine category definitions to ensure that
  categories contain the kinds of concepts the end
  user expects
• once categories validated in English can
  broaden to multilingual environments

TMRA '05, Leipzig, 7 October 2005
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Focus group findings
What's in a name?

• Ambiguity and confusion Well, it was
  interesting, challenging. It really makes you
  realize how much terminology we're all tied by
  and how troubling it really is (general
  agreement). I mean, people, you know like us
  that are allegedly finding information (laughs)
  and doing research all the time and we're going
  "what does this mean?", "I don't know what this
  is" so imagine the role of the user who is more
  baffled, presumably.
• The importance of context It is kind of hard,
  just looking at it sort of abstractly, sort of
  broken apart like this without being able to look
  at a few records or something, you know, because
  when you're actually using it, the context always
  does help. I mean that's part of understanding
  it, so you know, just because it's sometimes hard
  to understand then, how some of the things relate
  to one another cuz you don't know how they're
  going to be put together on the screen, that made
  it harder in some places.

TMRA '05, Leipzig, 7 October 2005
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Results display the prototype and topic maps
Overview
Repository
Swish-e (applying CMECR metadata categories)
Index
sent to
results output as
Query ("Baillie")
XTM (topic map)
Results
displayed on screen
transformed to
SVG
TMRA '05, Leipzig, 7 October 2005
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Results display the prototype and topic maps
Processing
inserted into
results
inserted into
Individual HTML results files for each category
XTM
category topic counters set
links to
output (browser)
XTM
SVG
HTML
embedded in
converted to
XSL
Perl-cgi script
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Results display the prototype and topic maps
Search interface
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Results display the prototype and topic maps
Search results display (XTM)
(clickable)
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Results display the prototype and topic maps
Search results display (node clicked)
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Results display the prototype and topic maps
Retrieved document
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Future work, and Implications of research
future research will include

• assess relevance of categories to search results
• evaluate display variables

some implications of this research

• integration of heterogeneous domains in resource
  discovery
• extends application of topic maps in area of user
  interpretation/understanding

TMRA '05, Leipzig, 7 October 2005