Sougata Mukherjea

PowerBookmarks: a system for personalizable Web information organization, sharing, and management

Users of the Web are overloaded with information. This medium is “polluted” with redundant, erroneous and low quality information. A WWW survey of 11,700 users conducted from April 10 to May 10, 1996[1] indicates that 30.31% of the users report “finding known info” is their problem and 27.80% of the users report organizing collected information as their problem. An empirical study[2] on users’ revisitation patterns to WWW pages found that 58% of an individual’s pages are revisits. With these study results, we believe the Web users would like to build and organize a larger collection of bookmarks for future references than they can reasonably maintain now.

AMORE: a world-wide web image retrieval engine

Advanced Multimedia Oriented Retrieval Engine (AMORE) [2] is a World-Wide Web image retrieval engine integrating several techniques to facilitate effective retrieval of images from the Web. With the explosive growth of information that is available through the WWW, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the users to find the information of interest. Therefore, search engines are becoming very popular and useful. However, most of the popular search engines today are textual. Although most Web pages have images, the current image search engines on the WWW are primitive.For traditional text retrieval the only way to search for relevant documents is by specifying keywords. However, for multimedia retrieval it is essential that the user is provided with various options for retrieving the target image. AMORE allows the user to retrieve images of interest using various techniques.The effectiveness of an information retrieval engine is also dependent on the user interface to show the retrieved images. In AMORE, the retrieved images are shown using thumbnails. Like traditional WWW search engines the user can browse through pages of results. We also allow the user to click on an interesting thumbnail and retrieve similar images. This visual navigation strategy is helpful in quickly retrieving the target images. To help the user if many images are retrieved we have also developed a Query Result Visualization Environment. This interface allows the search results to be organized in various ways. We believe that the integration of information retrieval with visualization is helpful for the users retrieval tasks.

Focus+context views of World-Wide Web nodes

With the explosive growth of information that is available on the World-Wide Web, it is very easy for the user to get lost in hyperspace. When the user feels lost, some idea of the position of the current node in the overall information space will help to orient the user. Therefore we have developed a technique to form focus+context views of WorldWide Web nodes. The view shows the immediate neighborhood of the current node and its position with respect to the important (landmark) nodes in the information space. The views have been used to enhance a Web search engine. We have also used the landmark nodes and the focus+ context views in forming overview diagrams of Web sites.

AMORE: A World Wide Web image retrieval engine

Search engines are useful because they allow the user to find information of interest from the World Wide Web. However, most of the popular search engines today are textual; they do not allow the user to find images from the Web. This paper describes AMORE, a Web search engine that allows the user to retrieve images from the Web by specifying relevant keywords or a similar image. Text and image search can also be combined. Moreover, we have developed a Query Result Visualization Environment that allows the organization of the results if many images are retrieved. In this paper we present AMOREs user interface and explain the technique for retrieving images visually similar to a user specified image. The method of automatically assigning relevant keywords to the images is then explained. Finally, the architecture of the system as well as some interesting observations of our experiences with AMORE are discussed.

Towards a multimedia World-Wide Web information retrieval engine

Search engines are useful because they allow the user to find information of interest from the World-Wide Web. However, most of the popular search engines today are textual; they do not allow the user to find images from the Web. This paper describes a search engine that integrates text and image search. One or more Web sites can be indexed for both textual and image information, allowing the user to search based on keywords or images or both. Another problem with the current search engines is that they show the results as pages of scrolled list; this is not very user-friendly. Therefore our search engine allows the user to visualize the results in various ways. This paper explains the indexing and searching techniques of the search engine and highlights several features of the querying interface to make the retrieval process more efficient. Examples are used to show the usefulness of the technology.

WTMS: a system for collecting for collecting and analyzing topic-specific Web information

Abstract With the explosive growth of the World Wide Web, it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to collect and analyze Web pages that are relevant to a particular topic. To address this problem we are developing WTMS, a system for Web topic management. In this paper we explain how the WTMS crawler efficiently collects Web pages for a topic. We also introduce the user interface of the system that integrates several techniques for analyzing the collection. Moreover, we present the various views of the interface that allow navigation through the information space. We highlight several examples to show how the system enables the user to gain useful insights about the collection.

Organizing topic-specific web information

With the explosive growth of the World-Wide Web, it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to collect and organize Web pages that are relevant to a particular topic. To address this problem we are developing WTMS, a system for Web Topic Management. In this paper we explain how WTMS collects Web pages for a topic and organizes them at various levels of abstraction. We also introduce the user interface of the system that smoothly integrates querying and browsing. Moreover, we present the various views of the interface that allow the user to navigate through the information space.

Object-based navigation: an intuitive navigation style for content-oriented integration environment

In this paper, we present the idea of object-based navigation. Object-based navigation is a navigation style based upon the characteristics at the object level, that is contents of the objects and the relationship among the objects. With objectbased navigation, users can specify a set of objects and their relationship. The system creates queries from the users’ input and determines links dynamically based on matching between this query and indices. Various kinds of attributes including conceptual and media-based characteristics are integrated at the object level. We introduced this navigation style into the content-oriented integration environment to manage a large quantity of multimedia data. COIR (Content Oriented Information Retrieval tool), an object-based navigation tool for content-oriented integrated hypermedia systems is introduced. We show how this tool works in indexing and navigating multimedia data. Using COIR, we have developed the directory service systems for the World-Wide Web and have evaluated the navigational capability and extensibility of our tools. Multimedia search engines including COIR, extract the characteristics from multimedia data at any web site automatically. Extracted characteristics are connected with each other semiautomatically and utilized in the navigational stage. With this system, users can execute the navigation based on the relationship between objects as well as the contents of the objects. In this paper, we present how the COIR tool increases the navigational capabilities for hypermedia systems.

Using clustering and visualization for refining the results of a WWW image search engine

Search engines are useful because they allow the user to find information of interest from the World-Wide Web. We have developed a WWW search engine called AMORE that allows users to find images on the Web. However, like textual search engines, AMORE sometimes retrieves a lot of results. Showing the retrieved images as pages of scrolled list, like other search engines, is not very userfriendly. Therefore, we have developed a query result visualization environment that allows the user to organize the search results in a Java applet using various techniques; for example, the user can use text and image clustering. This paper presents the architecture of the system and discusses the text and image clustering algorithms. Examples are used to show the usefulness of the techniques. CR Categories: H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval-Clustering; H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces-Webbased interaction

Visualizing the results of multimedia Web search engines

Search engines are very useful because they allow the user to retrieve documents of interest from the World-Wide Web. However, if the users query results in lots of records to be retrieved, just listing the results is not very user-friendly. We are developing a system that allows the visualization of the results. Visualizations of both text and image search are generated on the fly based on the search results.