Paper Reading #20: Designing a thesaurus-based comparison search interface for linked cultural heritage sources

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Reference Information

Title: Designing a thesaurus-based comparison search interface for linked cultural heritage sources

Authors: Alia Amin, Michiel Hildebrand, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Lynda Hardman

Presentation Venue: IUI '10 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces ;
February 7-10, 2009;

Hong Kong, China

Summary

 
This paper talks about comparison search, namely in the cultural heritage domain. The authors started with a preliminary study on experts trying to compare sets of artworks. From this study, the authors were able to identify certain areas of concern like name aliases, multiple languages, multiple terms, comparing many sets of data, single and multiple property comparison.  A thesaurus based algorithm solution is proposed in order to categorize data.  The uses are: learning about collections, planning exhibitions, and qualitative comparison.  They use a program called LISA in order to implement this. This paper mainly discusses the interface of the system and the interaction with it.
Some selection and comparison challenges mentioned are Searching artworks, Selecting artworks, and Comparing artworks. LISA was implemented on top of ClioPatria, a web-based application for searching through heterogeneous sets of data.

The researchers did two studies.  The first study was to get a grasp on problems experts have when doing comparison studies, and to determine the realistic use of comparisons.  The second study was to test a thesaurus-based comparison module that would be able to search, select, and compare different artifacts in cultural heritage.

LISA's ease of use was compared with RKDimages, a widely-used online cultural heritage archive. They found that overall LISA was easier to use than RKDimages, especially when it came to searching for many artworks and selecting artworksFuture works seem to indicate working on a better implementation of the auto-complete ability, supporting interactivity visualizations, and providing bookmarking and search history storage.

Discussion

 

I found this paper somewhat interesting. The target audience seems defined to art experts. Nonetheless,   the idea of using a Thesaurus to assist in search could be really useful. . It looked easy to use and looked self-explanatory.  One thing they could do for future projects would be to expand their domain to a different field.