Monday, April 18, 2011

Paper Reading #23 - Facilitating Exploratory Search by Model-Based Navigational Cues

Comments
Cindy Skach
Joshua Penick

Reference Information
Wai-Tat Fu, Thomas G. Kannampallil, and Ruogu Kang, IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary
The goal of this paper was to show the benefits of using navigational cues and the effects on exploratory search and knowledge exchange. The first major example that the group gives is social tagging and the effect that it has on people using search or discovery on the web. Sites now allow people to keep track of their web resources by tagging bookmarks in unique ways as way-finders which also allow research into allowing other people to use this information. This idea was then used by the group in order to see the effects on navigational cues. When viewing documents, they created a list of tags that the user could click on. When a tag was selected, a list of associated documents were listed along with other tags that each document might also be related to.

Discussion
This paper seemed a little convoluted for the most part. It was very broad when speaking and went on and on about seemingly nothing. The underlying idea is very important, however. The idea of tagging is getting very important online more and more. Tagging allows for a much easier way to connect to other things that the searcher may or may not have thought to search for allowing for a better search environment. I think the paper would have been better to show more actual real life applications.

3 comments:

  1. It sounds like this paper was more of a preliminary one that researchers might reference in the future when further work is done on this topic. I also agree with you that tagging is becoming more popular online. I recently read a paper that also discussed the importance and uses of tagging though they related it more to a real life application.

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  2. I also read this paper and found it really boring. It seems like multiple papers we have read are dealing with the same topic of social tagging. I really did not find anything extremely different from the other research papers.

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  3. The paper seems to be an explanation of how things are currently working on the web; I'm not sure what the novelty of it is. I use Google Docs quite often and they have implemented a tag system. I think it is pretty good, but it is still a bit harder for me to follow than a folder hierarchy structure.

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