ezDL: An Interactive IR Framework, Search Tool, and Evaluation System

ezDL is an open-source IR frontend system supporting proactivity, higher level search activities, the digital library life cycle, and collaboration of searchers. The ezDL framework is based on an extensible, service-oriented architecture, with user clients running on the desktop, in a browser or as a smartphone app. For performing user-centered evaluations, ezDL has a builtin evaluation mode that addresses many of the major challenges inherent in setting up evaluation tasks and tracking user activity during the experiments. Currently, ezDL is employed in three major application areas. For searching computer science literature, it connects to several different digital libraries. In the medical domain ezDL provides literature search for general practitioners, as well as allowing for retrieval of medical images, including 3D data. PerFedPat is an application of ezDL in the patent retrieval domain comprising tools for supporting the International Patent Classification, faceted navigation of results, clustered views of patent search results and cross lingual retrieval.