There are various ways and corresponding tools that the marine biologist community uses for identifying one species. Species identification is essentially a decision making process comprising steps in which the user makes a selection of characters, figures or photographs, or provides an input that restricts other choices, and so on, until reaching one species. In many cases such decisions shoul...

We illustrate the use of Querium, a novel search system designed to support people’s collaborative and multisession search tasks, in the context of the HCIR 2011 Search Challenge. This report demonstrates how a Querium’s interface and search engine can be used to search for documents in an open-ended, exploratory task. We illustrate the use of relevance feedback, faceted search, query fusion, a...

The query-based search paradigm is based on the assumption that the searchers are able to come up with the effective differentiator terms to make their queries specific and precise. In reality, however, a large number of queries are problematic return either too many or no relevant documents in the initial search results. Existing search systems provide no assistance to the users when they cann...

Categorized overviews of web search results are a promising way to support user exploration, understanding, and discovery. These search interfaces combine a metadatabased overview with the list of search results to enable a rich form of interaction. A study of 24 sophisticated users carrying out complex tasks suggests how searchers may adapt their search tactics when using categorized overviews...

Content providers, such as enterprises and organizations who publish their content on the Internet, aim at making their content visible and easily accessible to the users. The vast amount of data contained in databases impedes their efforts, as users often find it challenging to navigate through the available data and find the items that best suit their needs. It is therefore necessary for cont...

We introduce the notion of time-centered snippets, called TSnippet, as document surrogates for document retrieval and exploration. We propose an alternative document snippet based on temporal information that can be useful for supporting exploratory search. The idea of using sentences that contain the most frequent chronons (units of time) can be used for constructing document surrogates. We co...

While search behavior using dynamic query suggestions is understudied, it is virtually non-existent for dynamic search results (as currently experienced with Google Instant). We report results from a controlled lab study aimed at exploring the effects of these recent search interface developments – dynamic query suggestions and dynamic search results – on users’ search behaviors. Based on the a...

Folksonomy expands the collaborative process by allowing contributors to index content. It rests on three powerful properties: the absence of a prior taxonomy, multiindexation and the absence of thesaurus. It concerns a more exploratory search than an entry in a search engine. Its original relationship-based structure (the three-way relationship between users, content and tags) means that folks...

People can often find themselves out of their depth when they face knowledge-based problems, such as faulty technology, or medical concerns. This can also happen in everyday domains that users are simply inexperienced with, like cooking. These are common exploratory search conditions, where users don’t quite know enough about the domain to know if they are submitting a good query, nor if the re...

This study sought to investigate the recent claim by H.-O. Karnath and his colleagues that the crucial locus of neurological damage in neglect patients lies in the right superior temporal gyrus (STG), and not in the right posterior parietal cortex (PPC) as conventionally thought. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), we first tested the involvement of the right STG in a task commonly u...