Exploratory Search Framework for Web Data Sources Alessandro Bozzon · Marco Brambilla · Stefano Ceri · Davide Mazza The VLDB Journal (2013)

Exploratory search, defined as the situation in which the user starts from a not-so-well-defined information need and progressively discovers more on his need and on the available information to address it, with a mix of lookup, browsing, analysis, and exploration.

In this paper, we describe a general-purpose framework for exploratory search. We focus upon exploratory search in the context of multi-domain queries. We provide a formalization of exploratory search sessions through a SQL-like query language and protocol, namely SeCoQL.

use case: Organize a night out in Milan, by finding a good recent movie in a theater close to the city center and an high-quality restaurant nearby.

Evaluation Behavioral model of exploration model users’ mental phases (Initialization; Selection; Exploration; Formulation; Collection)

Evaluation Procedure Pre-experiment questionnaire Video tutorial Given search problems; user solved them. Post-experiment questionnaire

1.Evaluates the performance of our system Relevance of mental phases Mono- versus multi-domain search Richness of data visualization

2.Comparison with alternative exploratory systems

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