Dealing with Child Abuse and Neglect as Public Health Problems

Abstract

We describe the design, prototyping and evaluation of ARC, a system for automatically compiling a list of authoritative web resources on any (sufficiently broad) topic. The goal ofARC is to compile resource lists similar to those provided by Yahoo! or Infoseek. The fundamental difference is that these services construct lists either manually or through a combination of human and automated effort, while ARC operates fully automatically. We describe the evaluation of ARC, Yahoo!, and Infoseek resource lists by a panel of human users. This evaluation suggests that the resources found by ARC frequently fare almost as well as, and sometimes better than, lists of resources that are manually compiled or classified into a topic. We also provide examples of ARC resource lists for the reader toexamine.