Emerald | International Journal of Web Information Systems

A survey on information re-finding techniques

Tangjian Deng, Ling Feng — 2011-11-22 00:00:00.0

Abstract

Purpose – Observing that people re-access what they have seen or used in the past is very common in real lives. The purpose of this paper is to review the subject of information re-finding comprehensively, and introduce to readers the underlying techniques and mechanisms used in information re-finding. Design/methodology/approach – After analyzing users' information re-finding behaviors and their requirements, the paper studies the natural way of re-finding in human memory, and reviews state-of-the-art techniques and tools developed in the fields of web and personal information management for information re-finding. Findings – Four main re-finding support techniques on the Web are: re-finding tools in Web browsers; history service; re-finding search engine; and voice-based re-finding. Three main re-finding approaches are used in PIM: browse-based approaches; content-based search; and context-based search. Practical implications – Following the recalling mechanisms in human memory, the method of recall-by-context in both fields of web usage and personal information management can make users feel easy to re-find information. Originality/value – The paper gives a comprehensive overview of information re-finding techniques.

ReClose: web page summarization combining summary techniques

Brent Wenerstrom, Mehmed Kantardzic — 2011-11-22 00:00:00.0

Abstract

Purpose – Search engine users are faced with long lists of search results, each entry being of a varying degree of relevance. Often users' expectations based on the short text of a search result hold false expectations about the linked web page. This leads users to skip relevant information, missing valuable insights, and click on irrelevant web pages wasting time. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new summary generation technique, ReClose, which combines query-independent and query-biased summary techniques to improve the accuracy of users' expectations. Design/methodology/approach – The authors tested the effectiveness of ReClose summaries against Google summaries by surveying 34 participants. Participants were randomly assigned to use one type of summary approach. Summary effectiveness was judged based on the accuracy of each user's expectations. Findings – It was found that individuals using ReClose summaries showed a 10 per cent increase in the expectation accuracy over individuals using Google summaries, and therefore better user satisfaction. Practical implications – The survey demonstrates the effectiveness of using ReClose summaries to improve the accuracy of user expectations. Originality/value – This paper presents a novel summary generation technique called ReClose, a new approach to summary evaluation and improvements upon previously proposed summary generation techniques.

Result-reconstruction method to return useful XML elements

Atsushi Keyaki, Kenji Hatano, Jun Miyzaki — 2011-11-22 00:00:00.0

Abstract

Purpose – Nowadays there are a large number of XML documents on the web. This means that information retrieval techniques for searching XML documents are very important and necessary for internet users. Moreover, it is often said that users of search engines want to browse only relevant content in each document. Therefore, an effective XML element search aims to produce only the relevant elements or portions of an XML document. Based on the demand by users, the purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate a method for obtaining more accurate search results in XML search. Design/methodology/approach – The existing approaches generate a ranked list in descending order of each XML element's relevance to a search query; however, these approaches often extract irrelevant XML elements and overlook more relevant elements. To address these problems, the authors' approach extracts the relevant XML elements by considering the size of the elements and the relationships between the elements. Next, the authors score the XML elements to generate a refined ranked list. For scoring, the authors rank high the XML elements that are the most relevant to the user's information needs. In particular, each XML element is scored using the statistics of its descendant and ancestor XML elements. Findings – The experimental evaluations show that the proposed method outperforms BM25E, a conventional approach, which neither reconstructs XML elements nor uses descendant and ancestor statistics. As a result, the authors found that the accuracy of an XML element search can be improved by reconstructing the XML elements and emphasizing the informative ones by applying the statistics of the descendant XML elements. Research limitations/implications – This work focused on the effectiveness of XML element search and the authors did not consider the search efficiency in this paper. One of the authors' next challenges is to reduce search time. Originality/value – The paper proposes a method for improving the effectiveness of XML element search.

Load distribution by using Web Workers for a real-time web application

Shusuke Okamoto, Masaki Kohana — 2011-11-22 00:00:00.0

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a load distribution technique for a web server. It utilizes Web Workers, which is a new feature of Javascript. Design/methodology/approach – The authors have been implementing a web-based MORPG as an interactive, real-time web application; previously, the web server alone was responsible for manipulating the behavior of all the game characters. As more users logged in, the workload on the server was increased. Hence, the authors have implemented a technique whereby the CPU load of the server is distributed among the clients. Findings – The authors found that some caching mechanism is useful for utilizing client-side calculation. The caching suppresses the increase of communication load. A performance evaluation reveals that the technique plays a role in decreasing the CGI latency of both low-end server and high-end server. The average latency is reduced to 59.5 percent of the original system. Originality/value – Web Workers allows scripts to be executed with keeping the page response on a web browser. It is intended to be used for raising user experience. This technique utilizes Web Workers for a web server to distribute the load to its clients.

Modelling a web site quality-based recommendation system

Edelweis Rohrer, Regina Motz, Alicia Diaz — 2011-11-22 00:00:00.0

Abstract

Purpose – Web site recommendation systems help to get high quality information. The modelling of recommendation systems involves the combination of many features: metrics of quality, quality criteria, recommendation criteria, user profile, and specific domain concepts, among others. At the moment of the specification of a recommendation system it must be guaranteed a right interrelation of all of these features. The purpose of this paper is to model a web site quality-based recommendation system by an ontology network. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, the authors propose an ontology network based process for web site recommendation modelling. The ontology network conceptualizes the different domains (web site domain, quality assurance domain, user context domain, recommendation criteria domain, specific domain) in a set of interrelated ontologies. Particularly, this approach is illustrated for the health domain. Findings – Basically, this work introduces the semantic relationships that were used to construct this ontology network. Moreover, it shows the usefulness of this ontology network for the detection of possible inconsistencies when specifying recommendation criteria. Originality/value – Recommendation systems based on ontologies that model the user profile and the domain of resources to be recommended are quite common. However, it is uncommon to find models that explicitly represent the criteria used by the recommender systems, that express the quality dimensions of resources and on which criteria are applied, and consider the user context at the moment of the query.

Editorial

2011-11-22 00:00:00.0