Frank Sawitzki

Philipp Schaer, Daniel Hienert, Frank Sawitzki et al.

We will report on the participation of GESIS at the first CHiC workshop (Cultural Heritage in CLEF). Being held for the first time, no prior experience with the new data set, a document dump of Europeana with ca. 23 million documents, exists. The most prominent issues that arose from pretests with this test collection were the very unspecific topics and sparse document representations. Only half of the topics (26/50) contained a description and the titles were usually short with just around two words. Therefore we focused on three different term suggestion and query expansion mechanisms to surpass the sparse topical description. We used two methods that build on concept extraction from Wikipedia and on a method that applied co-occurrence statistics on the available Europeana corpus. In the following paper we will present the approaches and preliminary results from their assessments.

Daniel Hienert, Frank Sawitzki, Philipp Schaer et al.

Interactive visualizations for exploring and retrieval have not yet become an integral part of digital libraries and information retrieval systems. We have integrated a set of interactive graphics in a real world social science digital library. These visualizations support the exploration of search queries, results and authors, can filter search results, show trends in the database and can support the creation of new search queries. The use of weighted brushing supports the identification of related metadata for search facets. We discuss some use cases of the combination of IR systems and interactive graphics. In a user study we verify that users can gain insights from statistical graphics intuitively and can adopt interaction techniques.