Empowering users to explore subject knowledge by aggregating search interfaces

Abstract

Due to the popularity of link-based applications, one of the most important issues in web searching is how to retrieve information effectively from multiple sources. Consider Wikipedia as an example; users browse content by following hyperlinks from one page to another. A regular hyperlink states that there are some relationships between the two pages. Search engines like Google successfully use this type of information to rank pages in keyword search scenarios. Wikipedia can go even beyond that as a link is interpreted as the semantic relations between two concepts described within articles. Search engines and web-based, free-content encyclopedias have become key tools for finding and extracting useful information from the tremendous amounts of data that are available online. We extended our previous application, WNavi s , by integrating the search function with the term and semantic path suggestion techniques for aggregated searches. Note that research into aggregated searches (integrated searches) addresses the issues of presenting to users a result list with information from various websites and media types. Accordingly, the WikiMap# application, extended from our previous application, WNavis, was developed. Finally, we proposed our preliminary research design and extended evaluation measures in this study. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.