CeDAR: Centre for Database Access Research
Steve Pollitt, Director of CeDAR, provides a review of an extensive programme of research and development aimed at the end-user which promises
to have a dramatic impact on the design of interfaces for information retrieval systems.
Almost in the very beginning ...
The seed which has grown into CeDAR - the Centre for Database
Access Research was probably planted way back in 1973 at the early
days of online searching.
The Marconi Research Laboratories at
Gt. Baddow in Essex had developed an Automated Ultrafiche Terminal
capable of storing enormous quantities of information on high
density microform.
This device offered access for a wide variety
of potential applications from telephone directories to criminal
records, maps to images of grasses brought back by Darwin from
Australia, learning programmes to literature abstracts.
This was
a rich area for research and development and the writing of software
to make it possible to search what could amount to gigabytes of
information on the desktop - yes this was 23 years ago. Alas this
technology never made it from R & D to widespread application
... but that's another story ...
Seven years later ...
The CeDAR story resumes at the Polytechnic of Huddersfield where
a project to investigate the information needs of cancer therapy
clinicians began in 1980 in collaboration with the University
of Leeds.
What has followed is a succession of projects which
have investigated and developed interfaces for end-user searching
of databases.
The evolution of these interfaces follows a logical
progression from an expert systems approach to what is termed
view-based searching where some of the key interface features
have survived from the first prototype - CANSEARCH.
What follows
is a brief overview of the prototypes and projects highlighting
what survived and what became extinct.
CANSEARCH (1981-1986)
An expert systems approach - promising much and after several
years delivering promise:
- Description:
A touch screen display formed by selected hierarchies for
potential facets expected in queries for cancer therapy literature.
A rule-based program which controlled the interaction and formulated
legal MEDLINE search statements.
- Performance:
Sometimes (10%ish) it performed better than the real thing - as
judged by a real expert (i.e. not me) - at least in terms of the
quality of the search statements generated. Like all good early
expert systems (including MYCIN) CANSEARCH was never used in anger.
- Good features:
Easy to use interface which offered selections to the user
rather than requiring them to type
Browsability of controlled vocabulary (Medical Subject Headings)
Automatic inclusive searching
Occasionally it even impressed it's author - once given a rule
it never forgot it
- Not so good features (in hindsight):
Limited vocabulary
Complicated and time consuming to build
Didn't perform as well as the professional
MenUSE - Menu-based User Search Engine (1987-1993ish)
The first MenUSE system was built at the National Library
of Medicine in the USA and could be used to search the complete
MEDLINE database - switching subject matter revealed major weaknesses
in the expert systems approach. (beware advocates of intelligent
agents - been there, done that, no T-shirt, good luck with the
programming!)
- Description:
The original target information was on biotechnology, and
as no clear CANSEARCH-like model could be devised, a simpler menu-based
approach using combinations of selected concepts (akin to Quorum
searching) was used to present the user with several sets - one
for each combination - as the outcome of their interaction.
Browsable
menus were eventually automatically generated from the Medical
Subject Headings. Subsequent development for the INSPEC and EPOQUE(European
Parliament Online Query system) databases - courtesy of funding
from Huddersfield Polytechnic (as was) - demonstrated general
applicability and significant potential for multilingual information
retrieval
- Performance:
Never really tested - but it did work and it would always give
a result - unlike other approaches available at the time which
used a form-based model of interaction.
The highlights included
demonstrating a search in Japanese of INSPEC on DataStar from
the SIGIR conference in Copenhagen in the Summer of '92 and a
three day event in Brussels, including prime billing at the Council
of Ministers Working Party on Legal Data Processing in Brussels
in May '93.
- Good features:
As for CANSEARCH +
Extensive vocabulary with direct access to menus at all levels
using entry terms
Relatively easy to replicate for other databases in different
subject areas - using the INSPEC thesaurus and EUROVOC.
More informative screens incorporated the number of documents
against each concept or term derived from inclusive searching
- Not so good features:
Limited use of interaction - the process was one of complete
search specification and then a search
Required a thesaurus which would ideally have a limited number
of top-level concepts
VUSE - View-based User Search Engine (1993ish - )
A feature was introduced to MenUSE for INSPEC and EuroMenUSE
(yes we had to call the European Parliament System something like
that) which came to shift the thinking radically.
The feature
was implicit Boolean searching through filtered views:
- Description:
Browsable hierarchies, as in MenUSE, provided the means for
users to specify the subject matter of their search, but this
was then used to progressively refine the database.
Subsequent
views of the vocabulary would provide data on the number of documents
matching the condition of the filter and each entry on the view.
It seemed appropriate to drop the reference to menus as the user
was no longer selecting components of a search statement, they
were electing to see a breakdown of a selected subset of documents
according to different sets of criteria.
- Performance:
VUSE for INSPEC was tested at the conclusion of research which
examined ranking and relevance feedback extensions to a view-based
system - and found to perform slightly better in respect of recall
and precision.
Yet these sessions were mainly mediated - somewhere
in the design process we introduced too much complexity. Highlights
included watching MEP Assistants (including Mr Kinnock Jr) in
Brussels competing to demonstrate whose MEP was most active in
what area of the Parliaments business.
- Good features:
More powerful searching - akin to an analysis e.g. profiling
sets of documents by year or treatment code
More interesting to use, the approach lent itself to exploration
of the databases.
- Not so good features:
Difficult to understand and use - more so VUSE for INSPEC
than VUSE for EPOQUE
Proposals to enhance the forms-based Watch-CORDIS interface using
VUSE are still under consideration at the European Commission
in Luxembourg (I hope!).
HIBROWSE - High-resolution Interface for Database Specific
BROWsing and Searching (honest) (1993ish - )
The usability problems of VUSE were serious - a parallel development
in CeDAR demonstrating improved access to an ORACLE database -
HIBROWSE for Hotels - offered features which might overcome these
problems.
A British Library Funded project which went live on
March 1st 1995 provided the opportunity to examine usability issues
in applying HIBROWSE search techniques (View-based searching)
to the EMBASE database published by Elsevier Science Publishers
BV in Amsterdam :
- Description:
In the early attempts at design the user was to be presented
with multiple views for a chosen set of search parameters - browsable
indexing vocabulary (EMTREE), year of publication, author, journal,
institution.
This just would not work (in spite of the confidence
with which it was presented at the Online 95 conference!). The
current approach - illustrated below - enables the user to select
multiple views from the vocabulary according to the major divisions
(facets) of EMTREE (and more recently EPOQUE - we just can't leave
it alone).
The chosen views serve to mutually filter each other.
Each view (or facet) can be refined to reduce the number of documents
or expanded to increase them - forcing reciprocal updating of
the numbers of documents against each term or concept on the presented
views.
- Performance:
Looks promising but we have to develop the prototypes (one a Visual
Basic front-end to EMBASE on STN-International and EPOQUE, the
second a development in Natural for Windows accessing a subset
of EMBASE held as an ADABAS database on our own Sun Server - with
co-sponsorship from Software AG of the UK and Sun MicroSystems)
to a level that we can put them in front of real users. But you
can bet all the money you have the outcome will be very superior
than what is currently on offer to the end-user.
- Good features:
Even more powerful searching - a much more drivable interaction
Even more interesting to use, the approach lends itself to deeper
exploration of the databases where we can programme the full HIBROWSE
functionality and find out, for example, which Institutions write
the most papers on Alzheimer's disease
- Not so good features:
We'll tell you after the usability testing
- High points so far:
Presenting at the INFO 96 conference at the Tel Aviv Hilton in
May 1996
Presenting at the ISKO 96 conference at the Library of Congress
in July 1996
- Best description in HTML
View-based Searching on Intranet Systems (1996-1999) - A VACANCY
for a RESEARCHER
- Description:
Doing it for Web browsers - hopefully with collaboration from
two large and well respected organisations - there is a University
Bursary, which will hopefully be enhanced, to recruit a student
who would register for a PhD. Anyone interested please contact
Steve Pollitt to discuss the opportunity.
Projects
Steve Pollitt is the UK coordinator for
ISKO - The International Society for Knowledge Organisation.
HIBROWSE, VUSE and View-based Searching are Trade Marks of the
University of Huddersfield
Address:
CeDAR - Centre for Database Access Research
School of Computing and Mathematics
University of Huddersfield
Queensgate
Huddersfield
UK HD1 3DH
Tel: +44 (0) 1484 472147/472248
Fax: +44 (0) 1484 421106
The Web pages for CeDAR can be found at:
http://www.hud.ac.uk/schools/cedar
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This page last updated on July 15th 1996