The success of an enterprise information retrieval system is determined by interactions among three key entities: the search engine employed; the service provider who delivers, modifies, and maintains the engine; and the users of the service within the organization. Evaluations of an enterprise search have predominately focused on the effectiveness and efficiency of the engine, with very little analysis of user involvement in the process, and none on the role of service providers. We propose and evaluate a model of costs and benefits to a service provider when investing in enhancements to the ranking of documents returned by their search engine. We demonstrate the model through a case study to analyze the potential impact of using domain experts to provide enhanced mediated search results. By demonstrating how to quantify the cost and benefit of an improved information retrieval system to the service provider, our case study shows that using the relevance assessments of domain experts to rerank original search results can significantly improve the accuracy of ranked lists. Moreover, the service provider gains substantial return on investment and a higher search success rate by investing in the relevance assessments of domain experts. Our cost and benefit analysis results are contrasted with standard modes of effectiveness analysis, including quantitative (using measures such as precision) and qualitative (through user preference surveys) approaches. Modeling costs and benefits explicitly can provide useful insights that the other approaches do not convey.

Collection based approaches are commonly used in libraries for collections of physical and electronic resources. However nationally significant collections of research data are new development, one that is increasing importance to researchers. Bringing together datasets of national significance and making them openly accessible will enable to address some of the critical questions facing our society. In ecosystem domain, this will enable us to understand more about causes and effects of changes in the ecosystem. An implementation case study based on Tern's OzFlux data collections as a national collection program initiated by ANDS is presented. This paper demonstrates how the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) and the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) are working together to identify and publish nationally significant ecosystem data collections to enhance discoverability, accessibility and re-use.

We are looking at new effective ways to engage families in weight management. Going beyond targeting individuals out of their family context with a single intervention, we investigate ways of delivering tailored health information as an information service, using the family as a major contextual factor. In particular, we explore interaction modes and processes of engagement with families that would be most effective to provide an information service that users will perceive as a real benefit to them.

Research data collections are tremendously important and thus need good curation. However data collections are significantly different to publication repositories and so we need to ensure that these differences are taken into account when managing research data. We believe that a good way of approaching this problem is to articulate the needs of research data stakeholders - particularly users and creators. Consequently we have described an analysis of these needs and then examined costs in the light of these varying needs - it is important to note that costs are often incurred by different people to the beneficiaries. We finish the paper by showing practically how incurring software costs can provide valuable savings for both data creators and data managers.

When searching, people's information needs flowthrough to expressing an information retrieval request posed to asearch engine. We hypothesise that the degree of specificity of anIR request might correspond to the length of a search query. Ourresults show a strong correlation between decreasing query lengthand increasing broadness or generality of the IR request. We foundan average cross-over point of specificity from broad to narrow of 3words in the query. These results have implications for searchengines in responding to queries of differing lengths.

In this Note, we describe the preliminary analysis of the use of NetMeeting™ (NM) to share outputs of a simulation model between farmers and researchers at a distance. We mainly describe issues relating to the asymmetries between the two groups, which lead to different technology preferences and needs.

This paper reports on and discusses a set of user experiments using the TREC 2003 Web interactive track protocol. The focus is on comparing humans and machine algorithms in terms of performance in a topic distillation task. We also investigated the effect of the search results layout in supporting the users' effort.We have demonstrated that machines can perform nearly as well as people on the topic distillation task. Given a system tailored to the task there is significant performance improvement and finally, given a presentation that supports the task, there is strong user satisfaction.

There are many tasks that require information finding. Some can be largely automated, and others greatly benefit from successful interaction between system and searcher. We are interested in the task of answering questions where some synthesis of information is required-the answer would not generally be given from a single passage of a single document. We investigate whether variation in the way a list of documents is delivered affected searcher performance in the question answering task. We will show that there is a significant difference in performance using a list customized to the task type, compared with a standard web-engine list. This indicates that paying attention to the task and the searcher interaction may provide substantial improvement in task performance.

Article Free Access Share on The role of a judge in a user based retrieval experiment (poster session) Authors: Mingfang Wu CSIRO Mathematical and Information Science and Department of Computer Science, RMIT CSIRO Mathematical and Information Science and Department of Computer Science, RMITView Profile , Michael Fuller Department of Computer Science, RMIT Department of Computer Science, RMITView Profile , Ross Wilkinson CSIRO Mathematical and Information Science CSIRO Mathematical and Information ScienceView Profile Authors Info & Claims SIGIR '00: Proceedings of the 23rd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrievalJuly 2000Pages 331–333https://doi.org/10.1145/345508.345628Published:01 July 2000Publication History 1citation19DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations1Total Downloads19Last 12 Months2Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

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There is a simple method for integrating information retrieval and hypertext. This consists of treating nodes as isolated documents and retrieving them in order of similarity. If the nodes are structured, in particular, if sets of nodes collectively constitute documents, we can do better. This paper shows how the formation of the hypertext, the retrieval of nodes in response to content based queries, and the presentation of the nodes can be achieved in a way that exploits the knowledge encoded as the structure of the documents. The ideas are then exemplified in an SGML based hypertext information retrieval system.