During my stay in Amsterdam from 11st to the 17th of April 2014 I had the chance to exchange and discuss visualization as well as evaluation opportunities in the field of information seeking. At DANS I talked amongst others to Linda Reijnhoudt, Vesa Akerman, Henk van den Berg, Christophe Guéret and Rene von Horik about the visualization of the feature “enhanced publication” in NARCIS and about visualization opportunities in the CEDAR projects. I got to know how DANS involves potential end users in the development process. With Linda Reinjnhoudt and Christophe Guéret I discussed a concrete approach for visualizing citation-reference relationships of publications and they pointed vivoweb.org out to me. Many thanks for that really helpful suggestion. At the eHumanities group I talked with Andrea Scharnhorst and Almila Akday Salah about our user-centered design process at GESIS and about DANS.labs. Albert Meroño Peñuela introduced me to graph visualization with gephi (https://gephi.org/). Furthermore, I had the chance to attend the talk “Mapping new models of complex data” given by Renaud Lambiotte. As the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) was held at the same time in Amsterdam I was also able to attend the workshop “Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval“ as well as a few of the talks. During the poster sessions and in some of the breaks I discussed knowledge maps’ opportunities to support the information seeking process as well as potential evaluation techniques for that with different researchers.
To summarize the main outcome from my STSM discussions: all researchers I have spoken to agree that knowledge maps offer a valuable support for the information seeking process and that the user involvement in the developing process plays a key role. The next step will be to discuss specific techniques and methods for evaluating knowledge maps in the context of information seeking in more detail.
Dagmar Kern
GESIS, Cologne
The universe of web-interfaces of an information service institution
