Collaborative Multi-Paradigm Exploratory Search

New challenges for advanced web search interfaces and visualization tools arise as user needs shift from traditional lookup tasks towards more open ended search activities collectively described as exploratory search. Exploratory search opens new possibilities for employing social aspects for effective information retrieval. We facilitate exploratory search by providing users with an integrated search and navigation interface combining three search paradigms – full text search, view-based (faceted) search and content-based (queryby-example) search. Full text search is used for both domain data and metadata lookup, view-based search allows users to further refine/filter the respective result set, while content-based search orders or biases the results based on their similarity to a given set of sample results.