Leveraging Your Taxonomy to

Increase User Productivity

MAIQuery and TM Navtree

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Taxonomies aid site organization

Taxonomy provides: Framework for content

organization Hierarchical outline of your

content by subject categories

Basis for effective browsing

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Integrated taxonomy enhances findability

Browsable categories of a directory

Smart search for term equivalents Taxonomy terms (original or

modified) as labels Navigation aids incorporate

taxonomy terms and relationships

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Example Search: body growth

Complete database (60,000 + titles) Free text search

8 hits — some irrelevant Free text search on titles

6 hits — limited recall Search by taxonomy descriptor (AKA

subject term or category) 470 hits

100% relevant 100% recall

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Increasing User Productivity Items in an information

collection can be retrieved with better precision (relevance) and better recall by using a controlled vocabulary to assign subject terms (key words) to them How do you connect your

users to the controlled vocabulary?

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Connecting Users

1. Use the rulebase you’ve developed for machine aided indexing (MAIQuery)

2. Use the controlled vocabulary itself (TM Navtree)

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MAI’s talents MAI (Machine Aided Indexer)

helps authors and editors assign effective subject terms

automates the assignment of subject terms to items in legacy collections

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M.A.I. suggests the correct terms from the taxonomy as descriptors

M.A.I. rulebase recognizes term equivalents germs Microorganisms vaccin* Pharmaceutical drugs

Recognizing term equivalents enables enhanced search

Taxonomy terms on documents help sort and organize the content

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MAI’s “hidden talents” MAI can also:

Provide for the appropriate preferred term when given a word or phrase

Return preferred terms for uses of the word in different contexts

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More “hidden talents” MAIQuery can:

Show related terms from the thesaurus to broaden a search

Show the rules and preferred term’s scope notes to clarify how the preferred term relates to others in the thesaurus

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Presenting: MAIQuery™ Web page presents a search

box that will use the MAI rulebaseCan be in addition to full text

search and advanced search User enters a word or phrase

in the search box MAI searches the rulebase for

any occurrences of the word(s)

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MAIQuery

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the MAIQuery demo Uses web pages and php

coding:Passes the search words to

“dosearch.php”dosearch.php passes the term

to MAI’s concept extractorMAI returns a list of suggested

terms from the controlled vocabulary

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Suggested terms

The term Music is suggested by the rule for music*(1)Click on the first (the preferred term) to see the term record; click on the second to see the MAI rule

The term Instrumental Music is suggested by the rule for music*(1)Click on the first (the preferred term) to see the term record; click on the second to see the MAI rule

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Options Thesaurus Master can be

queried to show the term recordBroader termNarrower termsUse For terms (“synonyms”)Related termsScope notes

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MAI can be queried to return the rule that includes the search word(s)

Options, continued

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Show the rule

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Options, continued Your database/index of items is

then queried to bring back the records in your collection that are indexed with the preferred termFor our demo, we wrote an

xquery request into the gettitles.php file

Our 1100-title demo records are maintained by a MarkLogic server

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A list of items

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Choose the item Your user clicks on the

item(s) appropriate to their queryThe document details (or the

item itself) is returned

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The right stuff

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How’s it working?

What words and phrases do your users search for?

a search log can record “misses”

a user focus group can suggest additions

subject matter experts can help in their area of expertise

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Fine tuningModify your taxonomy to

respond to more words add common misspellings to

rules add alternate words as Use

For terms (synonyms) in the thesaurus (or as additions to the rules)

consider terms for addition to the thesaurus (candidates)

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The advantages MAIQuery connects your user

with the controlled vocabulary

Your user can review term records and rulebase rules to learn more about your taxonomy

Your user becomes more productive

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Another way to connect users

Category search used more than half the time for research

Also known as directory search, your user “drills down” from general to specific

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Value of Category search Searchers find info 50%

faster using browsable categories than using list returned from free text searchResults even stronger when

results not in top 20 returns Searchers prefer browsable

category searchChen, H., and Dumais, S.

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Search – the Directory Approach

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Category: Business and Economy

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Results: Business Libraries

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Your Thesaurus as Directory

Present your controlled vocabulary as a guide to your collection

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Thesauri OnLine Australian Governments' Interactive

Functions Thesaurus – AGIFThttp://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/thesaurus/000482.htm

Transportation Research Thesaurus – TRT http://ntl.bts.gov/trt/trt_topterms.jsp

NBII (National Biological Information Infrastructure)http://thesaurus.nbii.gov/SearchNBIIThesaurus/about.faces

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Presenting: TM Navtree Your thesaurus presented as

a navigation aid User “drill down” with all the

neighboring terms visible Each term indicates the

number of documents indexed with it

Terms are hyperlinks to a list of items

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A hierarchical tree

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See full topic coverage by revealing Narrower Terms

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Choose a term Click on a term, get the titles

indexed with it

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Choose a title Click on a title, get its details

(or bring up the item)

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How it’s done We used PHP Levels, an open

source application from SourceForge to create the tree

An exported XML version of the thesaurus is parsed to produce the required text file to populate the tree

The content manager is queried for the document totals

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How it’s done, continued When a term is selected, it is

passed to a gettitles.php A bit of php code connects to

the content manager and returns a string of data about each title

The web page displays the data in the format desired

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The advantages TM Navtree Top Terms

describe the organization of your collection(s)

Narrower terms help your user hone in on the most appropriate term

Adjacent terms impart connotation

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The advantages ALL the records indexed with

the chosen term are returned Your user finds what’s

needed more quickly and is more productive

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Questions? Comments?

Try out the demo atwww.mediasleuth.com

See more details:Data Harmony Programmer

Interface for Web ApplicationsThank you.Mary Garcia

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MAI Query and NavTree from Data Harmony

Making Users More Productive