WIRED Future Quick review of Everything What I do when searching, seeking and retrieving Questions? Projects and Courses in the Fall Course Evaluation

WIRED Focus Information Retrieval: representation, storage, organization of, and access to information items Focus is on the user information need User information need: - Find all docs containing information on Austin which: Are hosted by utexas.edu Discuss restaurants Emphasis is on the retrieval of information (not data, not just a keyword match)

Documents Information Need index query Rankingmatch documents ? Quick Overview of the IR Process

Indexing and Searching Queries models work against the index - Find words, word counts, phrases - Sequential search, indexed search Inverted Files & Other Indices Boolean Queries Sequential Searching Pattern Matching Structural Queries Data structures - The infrastructure of search - Varied per data set and query contexts

Personalized IR system design How would you design a personal IR system? Who would use it? How would you learn about them? - Interests - Sources - Preferences How do you evaluate a personal system? Understanding users is the key to personalizing search or search interfaces.

Information Seeking in Context Learning Information Seeking Information Retrieval Analytical Strategy Browsing Strategy

How do we search? Analytical careful planning recall of query terms iterative query reformulations examination of results batched Browsing heuristic opportunistic recognizing relevant information interactive (as can be)

Behavioral Model Recurring Web behavioral patterns that relate people’s browser actions (Web moves) to their browsing/searching context (Web modes) Modes of scanning: Aguilar (1967) & Weick & Daft (1983, 1984) Moves in information seeking behavior: Ellis (1989) & Ellis et. al. (1993, 1997)

ISeek Behaviors & Web Moves

What do I use? Starting - Bookmarks and groups of bookmarks - Search javascripts Chaining - Tabbed windows - Bookmarking - Printing Browsing and Differentiating - Firefox/Mozilla & recommended links - Blogrolls and PageRank Monitoring - RSS feeds with RSS reader - (Moderated) Listservs Extracting - Saving as HTML, Text, or PDF - Bookmarking & Printing

How do we really use the Web? People don’t read, they scan Web pages We move quickly, we know we can go back Quick experimentation & short memory Behaviors that work are reinforced & continued Satificing makes measures of quality difficult

How do I use the Web? Set of standard, daily Web pages Set of “occasional” Web pages - Fridays - movie reviews, show times, previews - Monthly - stocks and funds Quick focus on a subject, build a set of documents related to that and file for later use I scan quickly down the page and then back up the page Site maps, other links, walk up the URL

Future: Social Issues Who controls the sharing? Who controls the controls? “Give to get” systems Anonymity vs. Community - Community of “friends” - People as data points Free riders Logrolling and Over-rating

Future: Filtering for IR How about filtering, without the collaboration? - Individual preferences - Implicit and Explicit Text is analyzed - Feature extraction - Recall & precision measures New models for multidimensional users/uses/ratings Relevance Feedback - Faster matching, more accurate - Metadata (use data, preferences)

Future: Community Centered CF Forming and keeping community - Interfaces, functionality Helping people find new information - Interactive search - Group browsing Mapping community (prefs?) - Daily News Rating Web pages - Incenting users to share Providing access to stored preferences - Fair, open data collection - Users can tune data

WWW Documents Investigation How do you collect data like this? - Web Crawler URL identifier, link follower - Index-like processing Markup parser, keyword identifier Domain name translation (and caching) How do these facts help with indexing? Have general characteristics changed? (This would be a great project to update.)

Metadata Information that describes a document that is not (necessarily) in the document Describes the document in relation to other documents Context about the Content Document semantics Internally consistent descriptions of content for individual documents, document sets or a specified set of content. For collections or individual documents

Metadata Types Dublin Core elements MARC (machine readable cataloging) - What isn’t machine readable? Semantic Web elements Bottom-up, derived data Format-based - ASCII, EBCDIC - RTF - PostScript PDF - MIME

Digital Libraries We all have them - boxes, archives - Papers written - Bookmarks What I have - 4GB of academic & technical papers Mostly PDF, HTML, text - Indexed using Adobe Catalog, htDig, OS X Search - Data sets from previous studies - Program code - Scanned documents

Big DigLib Questions What’s a document? - A file or link How do you trace & track the information source? - Filenames, memory, metadata How do you integrate the variety of documents & metadata? - Stick to standard formats What kind of storage model? - Version Control system - Server storage - Filenames and directories When do you Index? - Continuously - After a backup Mostly boolean searching with attributes

Course Evaluations (next week) Volunteer to get, distribute, collect and turn-in evaluations Overall level of class expertise relevant for you? Favorite readings – type of readings? Least favorite (obscure – difficult) readings? Project ideas and group organization tools? Assignments: Group Work vs. Papers?