Exploring Web based Visual Interfaces for Searching Research Articleson Digital Library Systems
Previous studies that present information archived in digital libraries have used either document meta data or document content. The current search mechanisms commonly return text based results that were compiled from the meta data without reflecting the underlying content. Visual analytics is a possible solution for improving searches by presenting a large amount of information, including document content alongside meta data, in a limited screen space. This paper introduces a multi tiered visual interface for searching research articles stored in Digital Library systems. The goals of this system are to allow users to find research papers about their interests in a large work space, to see how document content relates to a search terms, and to refine their search queries using document content. The current, under development pilot system successfully presents graphical illustrations of search results produced from both meta data and underlying content in an intuitive visual interface that will assist user's search activities. With minor modification, the proposed system can be applied to a variety of other text based data repositories.
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