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The MURBANDY WWW User Interface
A Retrieval Component for Geographic Data
Maximilian Stempfhuber and Bernd Hermes
st@bonn.iz-soz.de and hb@bonn.iz-soz.de
German Social Science Information Centre (IZ)
Lennéstr. 30, 53113 Bonn, Germany
Luca Demicheli and Carlo Lavalle
luca.demicheli@jrc.it and carlo.lavalle@jrc.it
European Commission - Directorate General Joint Research Centre
Space Applications Institute Strategy and Systemsfor Space
Applications (SSSA) Unit
T.P. 261, 21020, Ispra (VA), Italy
Virtual libraries not only offer access to distributed sources of information,
they also allow integration of various media. The concept of heterogeneous
data is therefore extended beyond collections of differently structured
or indexed text documents. It also includes factual data, which is often
stored in relational database systems rather than in document management
systems. In addition to full-text indexing, retrieval systems use surrogates
of the documents' content to find relevant documents. This technique is
often applied to factual data as well, because the user's information needs
can not always be mapped to the data itself, but only to additional metadata,
like a classification or thesaurus.
To integrate heterogeneous data within a retrieval system, not only
the storage of the data, but also the retrieval process has to be integrated.
Current research focuses on vocabulary switching with cross-concordances
or statistical methods to transform queries between this vocabularies without
user interaction. In the projects CARMEN
and ViBSoz
(Meier et al. 2000) methods for metadata generation and vocabulary switching
are developed. ELVIRA,
an information system for market researchers (Krause&Stempfhuber 2001),
seamlessly integrates text documents and times-series data with an easy-to-use
graphical user interface. ODIN (Stempfhuber 2001) uses dynamic screen layout
and visual formalisms to construct highly interactive user interfaces for
simultaneous retrieval in heterogeneous information sources
As a special kind of data in regard to retrieval and presentation which
needs to be integrated into current systems, we built a prototype user
interface for the geographic data of (http://murbandy.sai.jrc.it/) MURBANDY
(Monitoring Urban Dynamics). The research was carried out together with
the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) of the German Aerospace Center
(DLR) for the Space Application Institute (SAI) of the Joint Research Centre
(JRC) of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy. The German Social Science
Information Centre (IZ) built a WWW-based user interface for querying geographic
data on the dynamics of the land usage in 20 European cities since 1955.
The information had been extracted by the SAI from remote sensing data
and was classified according to the international land usage classification.
It served as a basis for developing indicators and a simulation model for
the dynamics of land usage which are essential for a sustainable development
of urban areas.
In a typical setting, a user will analyse or compare differences in
the dynamics of certain types of land usage (e.g. industrial areas vs.
residential areas) in one to three cities. Therefore he specifies types
of land usage from a list of approximately 50 different types and selects
the cities in question. As a matter of fact, not all combinations of land
usage types and cities will exist (e.g. a city has no port). It is the
task of the user interface, to visualize the dependencies in the data and
to lead and support the user in the information seeking process. The MURBANDY
user interface applies the visual formalism of a table to show valid
combinations of the two attributes 'land usage type' and 'city'. We enhanced
the table with dynamic screen layout, so that only minimal space is occupied
and more can be used for displaying the results as maps. The table at the
same time acts as interactive query preview, allowing to (de-)activate
each single attribute combination. Every manipulation of the query instantly
updates the result presentation and therefore allows iterative retrieval.
Because indexing is used for accessing the geographic data in MURBANDY,
it may be integrated with document retrieval. Queries for documents could
be transformed in GIS queries (and vice versa) with cross-concordances
or statistical transfer modules. This would allow integrated access to
textual and factual data which supplement each other in many situations.
In this context, ODIN (Object-oriented Dynamic User Interfaces) provides
the means to integrate the results from information retrieval in heterogeneous
data sources at the level of the user interface.
References
Krause, Jürgen; Stempfhuber, Maximilian (Hrsg.) (2001). Integriertes
Retrieval in heterogenen Daten. Text-Fakten-Integration am Beispiel des
Verbandinformationssystems ELVIRA. [Forschungsberichte des IZ Sozialwissenschaften
Band 4] (to appear).
Meier, Wolfgang; Müller, Matthias N. O.; Winkler, Stefan. (2000).
Virtuelle Fachbibliothek Sozialwissenschaften: Problembereich und Konzeption.
Bibliotheksdienst 34:1236-1244.
Stempfhuber, Maximilian (2001). Objektorientierte dynamische Benutzungsoberflächen
- ODIN. Behandlung semantischer und struktureller Heterogenität
in Informationssystemen mit den Mitteln der Softwareergonomie. Dissertation
im Fachbereich Informatik an der Universität Koblenz-Landau (to appear).
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