Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1.
The topic graph computed from the
snippets for the query “Fukushima”
Fig. 2.
The topic graph from Fig. 1 has been
expanded by a single touch on the node la-
beled “earthquake”
the results consists of a touchable navigation based user interface which allows us to
interact easily by single touch and swiping gestures. For a tablet computer with larger
screens the intelligent mix of graphics and text makes a software system most appealing
to the user. Hence the result presentation consists of a touchable topic graph offering
multitouch capabilities like zooming and swiping.
We demonstrate our current solution by the following screenshots which show some
results of the search query “Fukushima” running with the current iPad and iPhone user
interfaces. In section 6 we present and discuss the outcomes of some user experiments.
3.1
Graph-Based User Interface on the iPad
The screenshot in Fig. 1 shows the topic graph computed from the snippets for the query
“Fukushima”. The user can double touch on a node to display the associated snippets
and web pages. Since a topic graph can be very large, not all nodes are displayed (using
the technology described in the previous section). Nodes which can be expanded are
marked by the number of hidden immediate nodes. A single touch on such a node
expands it, as shown in Fig. 2. A single touch on a node which cannot be expanded
automatically adds its label to the initial user query and triggers a new search with that
expanded query.
Fig. 2 demonstrates how the topic graph from Fig. 1 has been expanded by a sin-
gle touch on the node labeled “earthquake”. Double touching on the node “fukushima
dailchi” triggers the display of associated web snippets (Fig. 3) and the web pages.
