ERCIM News No.27 - October 1996
Information Retrieval and Metadata - Digital Library Activities at SICS
by Preben Hansen
The introduction of the Internet and WWW is bringing major changes
to the role of libraries. Digital Libraries are also of growing importance
in the field of Information Retrieval. At SICS, we are involved in both
national and international projects in this sector and we describe two areas
of activities:
Nordic Metadata Project
This is a joint Nordic project, sponsored by NORDINFO. The project is based
on the Dublin Core Element Set, which consists of thirteen metadata elements
developed in collaboration by OCLC, NCSA, Library of Congress and the British
Library. At the moment there are other Dublin Core-related activities in
the US, Europe and Australia.
From the libraries' point of view, meta-data provision poses some interesting
challenges: ie growing information resources, unstable digital documents
and new versions or renamed documents. The term metadata is increasingly
being used in the information world to specify records that refer to digital
resources available across a network. It is of major interest that embedded
metadata can be utilized globally. The ultimate aim of metadata provision
is to enhance end-user services by making digital documents more easily
searchable and deliverable.
The Nordic Metadata Project will:
- evaluate existing metadata formats
- create a Nordic version of the Dublin Core and its DTD
- convert Dublin Core to Nordic MARC formats and vice versa
- create DC Metadata Syntax, User Environment and Interaction. This
will include DC syntax requirements and recommendations; DC user guidelines;
Coordination of DC test collection creation; Information Retrieval interaction
and evaluation. We will adapt to the new functionality through evaluation
and adaptation of the user interface, search support and support guidelines
- improve retrieval of Nordic Internet documents. The Nordic Metadata
Project intends to develop and add new facilities to NWI (Nordic Web Index
funded by NORDINFO), so that it can provide a basis for resource description,
discovery and retrieval. To promote the production of metadata and the implementation
of services, it is important to have a search service, capable of using
the metadata. It is equally important that the search service treats metadata
correctly, adapts to the standards agreed upon, demonstrates the importance
of metadata for improved retrieval and supports search processes. This will
be done through modifying NWI's harvesting and indexing software, by adaptations
and improvements of the retrieval system and by creating test environments
for retrieval experiments.
Interface Design and Information Seeking Strategies
Research in information retrieval has traditionally concentrated on building
representations of content and queries, different IR techniques and indexing
methods. One problem for IR is support and designing for IR interaction.
Throughout the history of information retrieval, the research community
has been aware of the fact that the interaction between information seeking
users and the tools to access information sources is in itself important.
Information can be sought for different reasons and with different ideas
of how to determine what documents are relevant.
This research will describe a framework where the users have information
seeking strategies that can be recognized through user studies and supported
through interface design. The research is based on the idea that the IR
is an interactive process and we will also examine ways to describe and
evaluate the problems of search behaviour and navigation through a hypertext
system.
Different users, tasks and strategies
We consider users to be different: they have different backgrounds; their
tasks vary; their goals and reasons for using the system are different.
The introduction of the World Wide Web has increased the number of users,
and made access to information easy and user-driven. Users can be categorized
by different background and domains eg user activities fall broadly into
high level strategies, such as searching for specific information, with
a specifically framed information need or browsing for general information.
Assumptions of user goals and preferences can be made from background information,
provided users are informed and are given control over the assumptions made.
In conclusion, we feel that beyond the technical design challenges of Digital
Libraries and other information retrieval systems, there is also the need
to address other aspects, eg information seeking strategies, user interface
design, and user tasks and navigation in hypermedia.
We will use techniques from previous SICS projects on adaptive hypermedia
where an information system adapts to its perception of the users' task
and background, and displays information of different types. Our method
will be integrated to provide a model of end-user searching and navigation
in a hypertext system.
Please contact:
Preben Hansen - SICS
Tel: +46 8 752 15 54
E-mail: preben@sics.se
return to the contents page