Modern Information Retrieval Chapter 10: User Interfaces and Visualization

Contents

  
4. The SketchTrieve Interface

interface design!SketchTrieve SketchTrieve

The guiding principle behind the SketchTrieve interface [#!hendry97!#] is the depiction of information access as an informal process, in which half-finished ideas and partly explored paths can be retained for later use, saved and brought back to compare to later interactions, and the results can be combined via operations on graphical objects and connectors between them. It has been observed [#!nardi93!#,#!shipman95!#] that users use the physical layout of information within a spreadsheet to organize information. This idea motivates the design of SketchTrieve, which allows users to arrange retrieval results in a side-by-side manner to facilitate comparison and recombination (see Figure ).

  

Figure: The SketchTrieve interface [#!hendry97!#].

The notion of a canvas or workspace for the retention of the previous context should be adopted more widely in future. Many issues are not easily solved, such as how to show the results of a set of interrelated queries, with minor modifications based on query expansion, relevance feedback, and other forms of modification. One idea is to show sets of related retrieval results as a stack of cards within a folder and allow the user to extract subsets of the cards and view them side by side, as is done in SketchTrieve, or compare them via a difference operation.