How to make your content users more productive using Access Innovations, Inc.'s Navtree and Machine Aided Indexer (M.A.I.™), parts of the Data Harmony® software suite.

1. 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 rulebase
 Can 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 extractor
 MAI 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 record
 Broader term
 Narrower terms
 Use For terms (“synonyms”)
 Related terms
 Scope 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 term
 For 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 query
 The 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 tuning
Modify 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
search
 Results even stronger when results
not in top 20 returns
 Searchers prefer browsable
category search
Chen, 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 – AGIFT
http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/thesauru
 Transportation Research Thesaurus – TRT
http://ntl.bts.gov/trt/trt_topterms.jsp
 NBII (National Biological Information
Infrastructure)
http
://thesaurus.nbii.gov/SearchNBIIThesaurus/ab

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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 at
www.mediasleuth.com
See more details:
Data Harmony Programmer
Interface for Web Applications
Thank you.
Mary Garcia

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MAI Query and NavTree from
Data Harmony
Making Users
More Productive