Automatic Generation of Research Trails in Web History
Venue
Proc. IUI 2010, ACM Press
Publication Year
2010
Authors
Elin Rønby Pedersen, Shengyin Gu, Peter Jin Hong, Karl Gyllstrom
BibTeX
Abstract
The web is large and complex, and in the process of navigating it, we often lose
our way. Research trailing is a method to organize web contents that we have spent
some effort on into distinct research sessions. Research trails are automatically
constructed by filtering and organizing users’ activity history, using a
combination of semantic and temporal criteria for grouping similar web activity.
The design of research trails was informed by an ethnographic study of ordinary
people doing research on the web; it addresses the specific challenges of
establishing and maintaining context when the research process is fragmented and
the research question is still in formation. This paper motivates and describes our
algorithms for generating high quality research trails. Research trails can be
applied in several contexts: as the underlying mechanism for a research task
browser, or as feed to an ambient display of history information while searching. A
prototype was built to assess the utility of the first option, a research trail
browser.
