Modern Information Retrieval Chapter 10: User Interfaces and Visualization

Contents

   
1. Cha-Cha: SuperBook on the Web

retrieval results!Cha-Cha Cha-Cha

The Cha-Cha intranet search system  [#!chen98!#] extends the SuperBook idea to a large heterogeneous Web site  such as might be found in an organization's intranet. Figure shows an example. This system differs from SuperBook in several ways. On most Web sites there is no existing real table of contents or category structure, and an intranet like those found at large universities or large corporations is usually not organized by one central unit. Cha-Cha uses link structure present within the site to create what is intended to be a meaningful organization on top of the underlying chaos. After the user issues a query, the shortest paths from the root page to each of the search hits are recorded and a subset of these are selected to be shown as a hierarchy, so that each hit is shown only once. (Users can begin with a query, rather than with a table of contents view.) If a user does not know to use the term `health center' but instead queries on `medical center,' if `medical' appears as a term in a document within the health center part of the Web, the home page (or starting point) of this center will be presented as well as the more specific hits. Users can then either query or navigate within a subset of sites if they wish. The organization produced by this simple method is surprisingly comprehensible on theUC Berkeley site. It seems especially useful for providing the information about the sources (the Web server) associated with the search hits, whose titles are often cryptic.

  

Figure: The Cha-Cha interface for showing Web intranet search results in context displaying results on the query `medical centre'[#!chen98!#].

retrieval results!AMIT retrieval results!WebTOC

The AMIT system  [#!wittenburg97!#] also applies the basic ideas behind SuperBook to the Web, but focuses on a single-topic Web site, which is likely to have a more reasonable topic structure than a complex intranet. The link structure of the Web site is used as contextualizing information but all of the paths to a given document are shown and focus-plus-context is used to emphasize subsets of the document space. The WebTOC  system [#!nation97!#] is similar to AMIT but focuses on showing the structure and number of documents within each Web subhierarchy, and is not tightly coupled with search.

Superbook and related projects|)