Franco Crivellari

Understanding user requirements and preferences for a digital library Web portal

This article reports the findings of a user study conducted in the context of the TELplus project to gain insights about user needs and preferences for the digital library services offered by The European Library Web portal. The user requirements collection for the Web portal was designed by adopting a comprehensive survey approach. This combined explicit user feedback with implicit usage data so as to provide a more in-depth analysis of user experience with the portal. The analysis conducted shed light on likely motivations for both participant usage and reluctance to use the services provided, leading to more informed decisions on how to refine, improve, and present Web portal services to their future users. The lessons learnt from this case study also contributed to the development of an integrated methodological framework which provided insights for the future design and evaluation of digital library Web portals and services.

A Statistical and Graphical Methodology for Comparing Bilingual to Monolingual Cross-Language Information Retrieval

A new methodology for the evaluation of MultiLingual Information Access (MLIA) systems is proposed. This two-fold methodology exploits both statistical analyses and graphical tools in order to provide MLIA researchers guidelines, hints, and directions to drive the design and development of the next generation systems, and to provide a means to interpret and compare experimental results and to present these results to other research communities. An example of the application of this methodology is applied in the real-case study of the monolingual and bilingual tasks of the CLEF 2005 and 2006.

How to compare bilingual to monolingual cross-language information retrieval

The study of cross-lingual Information Retrieval Systems (IRSs) and a deep analysis of system performances should provide guidelines, hints, and directions to drive the design and development of the next generation MultiLingual Information Access (MLIA) systems. In addition, effective tools for interpreting and comparing the experimental results should be made easily available to the research community. To this end, we propose a twofold methodology for the evaluation of Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) systems: statistical analyses to provide MLIA researchers with quantitative and more sophisticated analysis techniques; and graphical tools to allow for a more qualitative comparison and an easier presentation of the results. We provide concrete examples about how the proposed methodology can be applied by studying the monolingual and bilingual tasks of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2005 and 2006 campaigns.

An architecture and design approach for a geographical information retrieval system to support retrieval by content and browsing

Abstract In present Geographical Information Systems (GIS), access to information is restricted to experienced users. On the contrary, it is important to permit to final users, easy access to information by content and in a natural way. In fact, a final user is not always an expert on GIS, but he is an expert in a specific application area, such as urban management or land administration. Geographical systems must be able to manage geographical and structured data, together with textual data, and data in other media. In fact, an active use of textual data can add an effective access point for the collection of geographical information. So, it is necessary to include textual-management operations in currently existing geographical systems, in order to provide a useful and comprehensive access point for geographical information collection to nonexpert users of the application. This paper introduces an architecture and design approach for a Geographical Information Retrieval System (GIRS) capable of supporting retrieval by content and browsing on textual data; the architecture and design approach provides the framework for the management of various kinds of media that are necessary to manage in geographical systems.