Principles of usable query interfaces
Arash Termehchy · 2012
People generate and share a huge variety of information that can be used to derive useful insights and create value for society. Keyword queries are by far the most popular method for users to search, explore, and understand such information. Because search is more effective when information is well organized, people often choose to add structure to their information, producing semi-structured or even structured data. However, the new structure is not always added in the right places, i.e., where it will maximize the improvement in search results. Further, seemingly unimportant changes in the structure of the information tend to affect search results in undesirable ways. In addition, current keyword search and exploration systems are not very effective for certain types of information and queries. This thesis addresses these three issues by showing how to determine where to add structure to information for maximal benefit, and how to use the resulting structure to provide effective and robust answers to keyword queries. Our first contribution is to determine what structure should be imposed on a given collection of information. Since the resources for converting information to a more structured format are always limited, our goal is to impose structure in a manner that will maximize the improvement for subsequent queries. In more technical terms, this means discovering and maintaining exactly the parts of a database schema that will most improve users ’ search and exploration experience. We show that adding structure corresponding to the most “popular ” parts of a schema does