Interacting with IDL: The adaptive visual interface

Abstract

IDL (Intelligent Digital Library) is a prototypical intelligent digital library service that is currently being developed at the University of Bari. Among the characterizing features of IDL there are a retrieval engine and several facilities available for the library users. In this paper, we present the web-based visual environment we have developed with the aim of improving the user-library interaction. The IDL environment is equipped with some novel visual tools, that are primarily intended for inexperienced users, who represent most of the users that usually access digital libraries. Machine Learning techniques have been exploited in IDL for document analysis, classification, and understanding, as well as for building a user modeling module, that is the basic component for providing IDL with user interface adaptivity. This feature is also discussed in the paper.