PERSPECTIVES ON.. .

Human-Computer Interface

EDITOR

Lois F. Lunin 922 24th St. NW, Washington, DC 20037 and the Department of Radiology, Cornell University Medical College, New York, New York 10021

CO-EDITOR

Donna Harman National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899

Introduction and Overview

Thirty years ago, a person wanting information was limited to asking a friend or colleague, or to asking an information specialist in a library for help in ways to use index publications. As the computers in organizations became more powerful, and as more textual material became available electronically, this search scenario evolved to include electronic searches by information specialists using the major online services. Today, the technology is available for the end user (the actual user of the information) to interact directly with computers to locate information.

All researchers know, however, that often there is no colleague, or one’s colleagues know only about a small subset of the information domain. Additionally, much of the material of interest to researchers is in journals, proceedings, or reports, and therefore is difficult to locate without electronic searching. But electronic searching using search intermediaries tends to leave the actual user of the information with little control over information gathering, often including no sense of the completeness of the search, and almost always an over- whelming amount of unranked information. End users traditionally have not used the electronic search facili- ties themselves (Summit, 1989), and systems currently being built especially for end users are either limited in scope or still difficult to use.

Information seeking is being revolutionized by the widespread use of personal computers, with access to large amounts of inexpensive storage including CD- ROM to store textual data, and with new linkages such as hypertext and multimedia. More and more text is produced initially in digitized form, and sophisticated scanning devices are facilitating the conversion of paper documents to electronic form. Libraries are acquiring new systems designed for the end user, and products for information retrieval are becoming available for use with personal computers. Easy-to-use information- seeking terminals such as kiosks are being set up in shopping malls, airports, and other public places. All this new activity means that the human-computer inter- face is becoming far more critical.

Focus on End-User Needs

This issue of Perspectives addresses the area of human-computer interfaces in information seeking, with particular attention to the needs of the end user.

0 1992 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

End users may or may not be familiar with their search subject, or with information-seeking techniques; in any case, the information system must provide quality ser- vice. Quality service means more than easy-to-use touch screens for input, or well-designed formats for output. The underlying systems must provide the answers sought by the users in a manner that requires minimal or no training, and in a manner that is totally compatible with the information-seeking environment. A terminal in a shopping mall should be able to answer simple queries on desired merchandise, and then produce a map to those stores selected by the user. An online catalog should be able to identify relevant books by subject, by (partially remembered) title, or by (often misspelled) author (Walker & Jones, 1987). Electronic searching operations on full text should allow input of natural language queries and then output (at the mini- mum) of a ranked list of document titles (see Harman, p. 164). Additionally these systems should offer “full service” systems, that is, if they can retrieve a docu- ment, they should be able to store a copy or print an online catalog entry. The general topic of quality service in information seeking is discussed by Marchionini, (p. 156).

Quality service also means going beyond the current approach to information seeking by using expert systems (see Gauch, p. 175) or by using imaginative methods of communicating information. This service could pro- vide an interactive table of contents and other book- browsing techniques as in Superbook (Egan et al., 19891, or use various hypertext methods connecting dis- joint sources of information (see Frisse & Cousins, p. 183). The various types of new multimedia hardware and software components provide access to information using methods that are only starting to be explored, such as navigating through a database of images from the French Revolution (Aigrain & Longueville, 1991), or exploring classical Greek civilization by using an in- tegrated system with Greek text, online dictionaries, photographs, and site plans, etc., as in the Perseus sys- tem (see Mylonas, p. 192).

There were three goals in selecting the topics for this issue. The first goal was to provide librarians and other information specialists with some guidelines and inspi- ration for purchasing truly useful information-seeking systems aimed at the end user. The second goal was to provide producers of information systems-or researchers designing future systems-with possible new directions for their production or research. The third goal was to show end users an array of possible

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE. 43(2):153-155, 1992 ccc 0002~8231/92/020153-03$04.00

information-seeking tcchniqucs to demonstrate the quality of service that could one day be available.

Five Articles-Five Perspectives

The first article, “Information-Seeking Interfaces for End Users,” by Gary Marchionini, summarizes the interface issues in information seeking. The task is divided into its various components; the important interface facet of each component is then discussed. Examples of various tools particularly suitable for each component of information seeking are described, with details as to how the features of a given tool add to the quality service aspects of the total system. The article also presents examples of innovative approaches to the complete information-seeking environment, and ends with a look at trends in this area, including seven specific issues for future research.

The next two articles deal with the deeper level of the human-computer interface: the production of sys- tems that are designed for the end user. The first of these, “User-Friendly Systems Instead of User-Friendly Front-Ends,” by Donna Harman, describes some proto- type retrieval systems that take a natural language query and return a list of documents ranked in order of likely relevance to that query. The article describes four prototype systems for different retrieval environ- ments, such as full-text retrieval or online catalogs. Each of these systems was designed specifically for end users, and specifically to fit the environment of those users, although all the systems accept natural language queries and return ranked lists of documents. Three of the systems use forms of relevance feedback, a method that helps users modify their query to improve results.

The third article goes somewhat further, describing prototype expert systems that apply artificial intelli- gence techniques to help in either citation retrieval or fact retrieval. This article, “Intelligent Information Re- trieval: An Introduction,” by Susan Gauch, describes five different approaches to helping end users perform searches. These range from intelligent menu systems to systems requiring extensive knowledge bases for fact re- trieval. The article ends with a comparison of the methods and a list of other expert systems in closely related areas.

The fourth article, “Models for Hypertext,” by Mark Frisse and Steven Cousins, discusses general character- istics of various hypertext models, illustrating the dif- ferent reasons for using a hypertext interface. The authors then discuss the problems of building interfaces for hypertext systems and the various techniques that have been used to solve those problems. The final sec- tion discusses current trends in hypertext and what can be expected in the future.

The fifth and final article, ‘#n Interface to Classical Greek Civilization,” by Ellie Mylonas, shows an inno- vative multimedia approach to information seeking.

This article describes the Perscus system which con- tains text and visual material related to classical Greek civilization. The system allows a user to see simulta- neously Greek and English translations, follow links from site plans of temples to photographs or drawings, view ancient objects from different perspectives, and conduct other similar explorations. The author dis- cusses how the interface was designed, and how the data was selected, to match the anticipated needs of users from many disciplines and levels of expertise.

Just as electronic systems have changed search pro- cedures during the past four decades, continuing devel- opments in technology; the integration of text with images, sound, data, texture, and motion; the trials and insights of the system designers; and the increasing sophistication of the end user will change the searches of the future. The research and development reported in this Perspectives issue represent a midstream human- computer interface; they report the present while they offer insights and principles that will guide future developments.

Although referring to multimedia, the following words describe well those pioneers who work in com- puter-human interface: “ . . . designers of today can’t rely on well-tested techniques and principles gleaned from other media. Instead.. . they must create new tech- niques and establish new principles for their medium, even as they practice their craft” (Adams, 1991, p. 5).

DONNA HARMAN LOIS F. LUNIN

References

Adams, E. J. (1991). Lucasfilm learning: In search of the elements, of design. Instruction Delivery Systems, 5, 5.

Aigrain, Ph. & Longueville, L. (1991, April). A connection graph for user navigation in a large image bank. In Proceedings of RlAO ‘91 (pp. 67-84). Barcelona, Spain.

Egan, D. E., Remde, J. R., Gomez, L. M., Landauer, T. K., Eberhardt, J., & Lochbaum, C.C. (1989). Formative design- evaluation of SuperBook. ACM Transactions on Information Sys- tems, 7 30-57.

Summit, R.K. (1989). In search of the elusive end user. Online Review, 13, 485-491.

Walker, S. & Jones, R. M. (1987). Improving subject retrieval in odine catalogues (British Library Research Paper 24).

About the Authors

Mark E. Frisse is an Associate Professor of Medicine, Medical Informatics, and Computer Science (part-time) at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his B.S. from the University of Notre Dame and his M.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. He trained in Internal Medicine and Hematology/Oncology at Wash- ington University, and later received a Master’s Degree in Medical Computer Science from Stanford Univer-

154 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE-March 1992

sity. In addition to his current academic titles, Dr. Frisse is Co-Director at a National Library of Medicine Train- ing Program in Medical Informatics at Washington University. His research interests include hypermedia, information retrieval, library sciences, and information systems for genetic mapping and other areas of basic biomedical research. Steve B. Cousins is a Research Associate in the Departments of Internal Medicine and Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Washington University, and has been a member of the Medical Informatics Laboratory since its inception. He is interested in the application of principles of computer science to problems in medical information manage- ment. His research interests include Bayesian inference systems, text systems, and visualization formalisms for temporal data.

Susan Gauch received an Honours B.Sc. in Comput- ing and Information Sciences and Mathematics in 1981 and a M.Sc. in Computing and Information Sciences in 1982 from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1990. She was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Wellesley College from 1989-1991, and has recently joined the Biological Knowledge Labo- ratory of the College of Computer Science at North- eastern University as a Senior Research Assistant. She has been working with online text processing since her first computer-related summer job in 1980. Her interests

focus on how to make large quantities of online text accessible to casual users.

Donna Harman received an M.E.E. degree in elec- tronic engineering from Cornell University. She worked with Professor Gerard Salton on the SMART project, and as a researcher at the National Library of Medicine in the areas of expert systems in medicine and informa- tion retrieval systems. Currently she is a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology doing implementation, user testing, and evaluation of prototype information retrieval systems for various broad applications.

Gary Marchionini is an Associate Professor in the College of Library and Information Services at the University of Maryland and a member of the Human- Computer Interaction Laboratory. He teaches courses in human-computer interaction, computer applications, and research methods, and conducts research related to information seeking in electronic environments and human-computer interaction. He has published widely in information science, computer science, and educa- tion journals.

Ellie Mylonas is completing her Ph.D. in Classics at Brown University. She is currently a Research Associ- ate in the Classics Department at Harvard University, and is the Managing Editor of the Perseus Project. She has published and spoken on hypertext, descriptive markup and literary texts, and the use of computers in education. She is also a member of the Text Represen- tation Committee of the Text Encoding Initiative.

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE-March 1992