spagnolo ph day2011

DIPARTIMENTO DI ELETTRONICA E INFORMAZIONE

PhDAY 2011

Exploratory computing designing engines for discovery-driven user experiences

Luigi Spagnolo: [email protected]


Exploration vs. search

•  E.g. a website presenting a research lab •  Search task:

§  "find recent significant publications on a certain argument and/or by certain authors"

•  Exploratory user experience: §  understand the research interests of the lab (and

of its members) and how they evolved over time. §  Evaluate the quality of research in terms of

publications and of collaboration with other universities.


Exploration: a definition

•  Moving into a information space representing a certain domain §  The purpose: discovering additional information

the properties (the facets) of the objects in it §  A sort of user-centred, interactive data mining §  The query is not aimed at finding a set of objects,

but rather… §  At defining the target set of objects whose

properties are observed and analysed

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My proposal: FELIS

•  Faceted Exploration for Leverage of Information Systems

•  A comprehensive framework for exploratory user experiences, covering: §  knowledge representation and querying § widgets and interaction patterns for

semantic faceted explorations §  information visualization strategies to

highlight the correlation between properties, supported by exploration metrics

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FelisQL •  A language for knowledge representation and

querying §  An extension to LISQL (Ferré 2011, University of Rennes I) §  Can be seen either as a different notation for RDF/SPARQL

or as an autonomous, high level query language •  User and application centred perspective:

§  High expressive power §  Queries easily represented in the interface §  Uniform way of describing resources coming from different

sources (e.g. mash-ups) and of different kind (controlled vocabularies, ontologies, folksonomies, text mining data)

§  Simplified exchange of structured data between client and server in rich internet applications

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FelisQL: a query

a publication and author: (an associate professor and affiliation: ‘Politecnico di Milano’)

at position: “first” or “second”, (a researcher and affiliation: (an university and country: not ‘Italy’))

Publications having as first or second author an associate professor from Politecnico di Milano, and as as additional author a researcher that is affilated to an university that is not in Italy


The interface | 1 •  Facet widgets allow to navigate and analyse items

according to a specific property (e.g. author) •  Hyperlinks allow for query trasformations

§  Add new constraints (existential restrictions) on specific properties and (the facets)

§  Add alternatives on the existing filters •  Focus: any sub-expression of the query

§  The point at which a new filter is “appended” à allows to build full-Boolean queries of arbitrary depth

§  A different point of view on the target of the exploration

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The interface | 2

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The interface | 3

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Information visualization | 1

•  Tag clouds and histograms to represent the relevance of facet values

•  Possible measures of relevance §  E.g. given the query a Publication and author: (an ‘Associate

Professor’ and the restriction subject: “exploratory interfaces” §  Count: how may publications that are authored by an associate

professor have also “exploratory interfaces” as subject? §  Recall: how many of those that have “exploratory interfaces” as

subject are also authored by an associate professor? §  Other “custom measures”: e.g. average impact factor of

publications having “exploratory interfaces” as subject •  Multi-dimensional views for query results: charts,

maps, etc. •  Metrics for measuring “changes in explorations”

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An interactive map of venues of archaeologic interest in Italy with location: “Northern Italy” selected



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Shift to location: “Southern Italy” the colors indicate the increase/decrease of relevance of ancient civilizations in this area w.r.t. to North


Thank you for your kind attention! For questions and details, write me at [email protected]

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spagnolo ph day2011

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