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published_or_final_version / abstract / Computer Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

Nanoscience and technology is characterized by nano researchers as an increasingly interdisciplinary domain, drawing upon such disciplines as chemistry, physics, materials science, and computer, electrical, mechanical and biomedical engineering. A key challenge faced by information professionals involved in organizing and providing the related information services is to efficiently identify information resources and to carry out inclusive and effective searches in a diverse and heterogeneous range of digital libraries, web-based databases and search engines. This demand emphasizes the importance of thinking about and developing methodological models for investigating interdisciplinary knowledge organization practices. This 2008 study examined the extent of interdisciplinarity in user queries submitted to the NANOnetBASE digital library. Transaction logs of the digital library were analyzed to explore usersâ search behaviour patterns and to examine the extent to which user queries were interdisciplinary. The Inspect thesaurus and Classification codes were utilized the disciplinary or interdisciplinary focus of the queries. The results indicate that 62% of the unique top terms resulting from mapping usersâ query terms to the INSPEC Classification codes represented two or more disciplines, specifically terms associated with the Classification code â Aâ representing â physics.â The results contribute to the development of more critical information organization and classification practices in such an increasingly interdisciplinary domain as nanoscience and technology.

Copyright Robert H. McDonald and Chuck Thomas 2006. This work is the intellectual property of the authors. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided that this copyright statement appears on the reproduced materials and notice is given that the copying is by permission of the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the authors. / Electronic performance support tools are used in many workplaces, but digital libraries have not evaluated their potential usefulness. In a pilot project, the Florida State University Libraries developed inexpensive performance support tools for three types of in-house digital publishing. This strategy improved productivity and quality control. (Author abstract)

In this paper, an idea for integrating research in information retrieval and scientific communication in LIS is proposed. This idea is based on the generation and use of subject maps for documents in a specific domain. A subject map, as defined in this paper, is a kind of representation of the important subjects in the target domain and their mutual conceptual relationships, on a two-dimensional graph. The map can be used in many applications in information retrieval and scientific communication. For example, it can be used as an interface in information retrieval systems, to display terms and their relationships in thesauri, and as a tool to explore research and developments of a scientific discipline. The method to generate subject maps is also described. The method comprises four processes: document preparation, information extraction, map generation, and information visualization. All these processes are based on concepts and technologies from both the domains of information retrieval and scientific communication.

This article discusses Web search engines; mainly the challenges in indexing the World Wide Web, the user behaviour, and the ranking factors used by these engines. Ranking factors are divided into query-dependent and query-independent factors, the latter of which have become more and more important within recent years. The possibilities of these factors are limited, mainly of those that are based on the widely used link popularity measures. The article concludes with an overview of factors that should be considered to determine the quality of Web search engines.

The search engine has become one of the most popular tools used on the Internet. Most of the existing search engines locate information based on queries consisting of a small number of keywords provided by the users. Although those search engines can query their databases and retrieve documents in a timely manner, the quality of the results is often unsatisfactory. This problem, based on previous studies and our observation, is partially due to the lack of semantic interpretation of a search request, as well as the user's incapability to precisely express their information need in a short query. In this research, we propose a conceptual framework that classifies various types of context in a Web search environment and present a new semantics-based approach that disambiguates user queries by analyzing the "relationship" context associated with query concepts.Our multi-methodological research approach includes: (i) building a context framework by categorizing different types of context; (ii) proposing a search mechanism that discovers and utilizes semantic relationships among query terms; (iii) demonstrating the practical implications of our proposed model using a proof-of-concept prototype system; and (iv) evaluating the usefulness of "relationship" context through an experimental study. From a technical perspective, our approach integrates ideas from semantic network, ontology, and information retrieval techniques. The experimental study conducted in the medical domain shows that our approach is effective and outperforms an existing popular search engine on search tasks consisting of key semantic relationships.

“Getting an overview” is a common task performed by coastal professionals in the early phases of management activities. This task involves collecting a variety of information about an area or topic to generate a first impression. This exploratory study examined this single task in detail so as to make recommendations about customizing search results to support that task through the use of an e-Card. Using a structured questionnaire, 20 coastal managers selected coastal characteristics that they would use to generate that first impression. Analysis of the data revealed fifteen core coastal characteristics that were used for the task. The work role that the professional was involved in emerged as a factor that influences characteristic selection. Fieldwork, such as scientific data collection, and management activities, such as drafting management plans, required different coastal characteristics to generate an overview. A prototype e-Card was designed as a proposed task-based search tool.

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