User Interface Design for a Large-Scale Computer

Science Research Digital Library

Min-Yen Kan

Department of Computer Science

National University of Singapore

HFE SERC 2006

Finding research on human factors

Type “human factors” in the search engine

Your prof. assigns you to do a survey paper on HFE. What do you do?

HFE SERC 2006

The domain of scholarly information But scholarly information has structure. We should leverage it.

• Producers publish information in a way to be digested easily– Identifiable sections, strong discourse structure– Reference and citations that form a citation network

• Consumers have ordinary tasks that they need to do with the literature

– Literature survey – Subject expert identification– Technique / methodology to solve problem– Find equivalent / abstract version of specific problem

HFE SERC 2006

Research ObjectivesHave existing system – CiteSeer (700K PDF files covering an

approximate 30% of computer science literature)

Have some advanced services implemented (query expansion, spelling correction, keyphrase extraction, presentation synchronization and citation typing)

Q: How to best integrate?

Find suitable methods to integrate advanced scholarly digital library services with existing system

1. Map advanced services into work packages2. Uncover new requirements that need new services to supported

HFE SERC 2006

Scope

Broadly: user interface design w.r.t. information seeking

Narrowing it down:• Limit to computer science• Limit to postgraduate students as user base• Be implementation-aware, but generalize results for for research agenda• Limit to dataset where full text of paper and presentation is available

HFE SERC 2006

Challenges

Project requires acute awareness of:• Different levels of expertise in user base

– need to be task-aware

• Legacy user interface effects• The evolution of information need over a project• Privacy issues with annotations, session data• Dynamic HTML capabilities• Constraints of accessibility given by alternate resources

HFE SERC 2006

Applications

Will be applied to our local version of CiteSeer• Intent to make Singapore a key stop for CS students doing literature information seeking

Further links between PI and NUS Libraries on porting such UI research to library catalog design