Projects

Current: AQUAINT CLEF MyShelf EIKON 2D-Maps Web Mining Transparent Retrieval

Post doctoral research project AQUAINT (Automatic Quality Assessment for Internet Resources)

The amount of knowledge available on the internet has led to a delegation of search ing to machines. More and more, computers also assess the quality of the content of documents. Most systems rely solely on link analysis which provides only a limited perspective on quality.
AQUAINT is refining link-analysis and creates novel systems for the assessment of content quality in the internet. First evaluations showed promising results. The quality model will be integrated into a prototypical search engine.

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Cross Language Evaluation Forum

The Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) is supported by the EU and is developing methods and an infrastructure for cross lingual seach methods. CLEF is based on experiences from the TREC-Initiative (Text Retrieval Conference).
The information sciencce group at the university of Hildesheim takes part in the experimens and is also involved in the creation of the multilingual topic set. In addition, the validity of the results is estimated.

Publications:: Mandl & Womser-Hacker 2002, Kluck et al. 2002

Virtual library shelf MyShelf

MyShelf is an information system for browsing based on the metaphor of a virtual library shelf. Like a traditional library shelf, it allows the exploration of the neighborhood of a document. Neighborhood represents semantic closeness which usually has many facets. In MyShelf, the ordering system of a shelf can be changed and the collection is reorganized on the fly. As a consequence, different neighborhoods of a document can be explored which allows the selection of an appropriate cognitive perspective. The user can rely more on the associative nature of browsing in order to solve his vague information needs.

Publications: Mandl & Womser-Hacker 2003, Heinz et al. 2003

EIKON

Within EIKON, a configuration system for car multimedia products is developed. In cooperation with the company Blaupunkt, the project concentrates on usability and information management aspects.

Publications: Hellmer et al. 2004

Usability of 2D Map Visualizations

Two-dimensional document maps are often used for visualization in information retrieval. In this project, we create maps with the Kohonen network and Latent Semantic Indexing in order to evaluate and compare the resulting systems from a users' perspective.
(cooperation with Maximilian Eibl, GESIS, Berlin)

Publications: Eibl & Mandl 2003, Eibl & Mandl 2002, Eibl & Mandl 2001

Web Mining for a Cross Language Link Matrix

The goal of this project is a cross link matrix for languages from the web. How often do pages link to pages with the same or another page is the central question. The results will be related to web usage data.

Transparent Retrieval from Patent Datenbases

Some database hosts still offer primarily boolean retrieval instead of probabilistic systems. One reason is the lack of transparency in probabilistic retrieval models. In this project, we intend to develop a transparent retrieval model for the patent databases of the FIZ.

Abgeschlossene Projekte

Dissertation project COSIMIR

COSIMIR (Cognitive Similarity Learning in Information Retrieval) is an innovative information retrieval model integrating human knowledge into the core of the retrieval process . It applies backpropagation to retrieval, integrating human centered, soft and tolerant computing into the core of the retrieval process.

Publications: Mandl 2001, Mandl 2000, Mandl 1999

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ELVIRA (Market information system)

ELVIRA is a online informations ystem for statistics and text documents for market research. More than 300 market experts are using ELVIRA. The focus during the development was human-centered design and switching between statistics and text documents. ELVIRA was developed at the social science information centre, Bonn in cooperation with three large industrial asscociations in Germany.

Publications: Krause et al. 1997, Krause et al. 1998, Mandl & Stempfhuber1998

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WING (Materials information system)

WING (materials information system with natural language and graphical user interface) is a multimodel materials information system. During development, especially vague retrieval and human-compuer interaction were optimized. Intelligent components were also integrated.

Publications: Ludwig & Mandl 1997, Mandl 1994