Plus one or minus one: A method to browse from an object to another object by adding or deleting an element

Abstract

Recently, users can find various kinds of information in the Web. When a user browses information, he/she sometimes wants to browse more desirable information by adding/deleting few more. However, there is no service to browse such desirable information from current information. We focused on such users' browse/search intention. Here, each information consists of some elements such as ingredients, persons, and places. We call the information "collective Web object". In this work, we propose a method to enable users to browse from current collective Web object to desirable collective Web object by adding one element into it or deleting one element from it. In addition, we introduce the concept of structural stability of collective Web object based on constructing elements and apply our method to recipe search. We implemented a prototype system and performed experiments to evaluate the usefulness and the applicability of our method. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.