Browsing and Experiencing Repositories of Spatially Oriented Historic Photographic Images

Many institutions archive historical images of architecture in urban areas and make them available to scholars and the general public through online platforms. Users can explore these often huge repositories by faceted browsing or keyword-based searching. Metadata that enable these kinds of investigations, however, are often incomplete, imprecise, or even wrong. Thus, retrieving images of interest can be a cumbersome task for users such as art and architectural historians trying to answer their research questions. Many of these images, often containing historic buildings and landscapes, can be oriented spatially using automatic methods such as “structure from motion” (SfM). Providing spatially and temporally oriented images of urban architecture, in combination with advanced searching and exploration techniques, offers new potential in supporting historians in their research. We are developing a 3D web environment useful to historians enabling them to search and access historic photographic images in a spatial context. Related projects use 2D maps, showing only a planar view of the current urban situation. In this paper, we present an approach to create interactive views of 4D city models, i.e., 3D spatial models that show changes over time, to provide a better understanding of the urban building situation regarding the photographer’s position and surroundings. A major feature of the application is to make it possible to spatially align 3D reconstruction models to photogrammetric digitized models based on historical photographs. At the same time, this mixed methods approach is used for validation of the 3D reconstructions.

A Framework for Dynamic Facet Ordering Search in E-Commerce

Faceted browsing is wide employed in internet outlets and merchandise comparison sites. In these cases, a hard and fast ordered list of aspects is usually utilized. This approach suffers from 2 main problems. First, one has to invest a major quantity of time to plan an efficient list. Second, with a hard and fast list of aspects it will happen that a aspect becomes useless if all product that match the question area unit associated to it specific aspect. during this work, tend to gift a framework for dynamic aspect ordering in e-commerce. supported measures for specificity and dispersion of aspect values, the totally automatic algorithmic program ranks those properties and aspects on prime that result in a fast drill-down for any attainable target product. In distinction to existing solutions, the framework addresses e-commerce specific aspects, like the likelihood of multiple clicks, the grouping of aspects by their corresponding properties, and therefore the abundance of numeric aspects. In an exceedingly large-scale simulation and user study, approach was, in general, favourably compared to an aspect list created by domain specialists, a greedy approach as baseline, and a progressive entropy-based resolution.

The use of an academic library's discovery layer: an ethnographic approach

For several years commentators have asserted that libraries’ traditional OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogues) are failing to meet user expectations. In recent years many academic libraries have implemented discovery layers, systems designed to address the issues of traditional OPACs by allowing e-resources which are not in the library’s catalogue to be searched alongside records in the library’s catalogue and offering a range of features, such as a simple ‘Google-like’ search box, faceted browsing, a “Did you mean…?” feature, suggested alternative searches, user contributions and a more visually appealing interface. Research into how users are using discovery layers for their own research needs is limited. This dissertation investigates how users at Senate House Library are using the discovery layer Encore and which features they find useful. An ethnographic method including observation and interviews is employed to provide an in-depth insight into users’ search experiences.The main findings are that users almost universally start a search using a basic search box, rather than immediately going to advanced search. In contrast to some previous research, several users employed a thorough search approach, carefully evaluating results and looking through multiple pages of results. The idea of location is important to users at Senate House Library. The physical location of search results is not always clear to users who sometimes find a resource in Encore they wish to access only to discover the location it is in is not one to which they have access or is not one to which they wish to travel. Facets are generally found to be useful, but may not be noticed or understood. Content information such as summaries and tables of content are very important to some users. Other features were rarely mentioned or used. Recommendations for further research into the use of Encore at Senate House Library are provided.

AN INTEGRATED APPROACH FOR LINKED DATA BROWSING

The Netherlands' Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency – in short Kadaster – collects and registers administrative and spatial data on property and the rights involved. Currently, the Kadaster is publishing its geo-spatial data assets as Linked Open Data. The Kadaster manages hundreds of datasets that describe hundreds of millions of geospatial objects, including all Dutch buildings, roads, and forests. <br><br> The Kadaster exposes this large collection of data to thousands of daily users that operate from within different contexts and that need to be supported in different use cases. Therefore, Kadaster must offer diverse, yet complementary, approaches for browsing and exploring the data it publishes. Specifically, it supports the following paradigms for browsing and exploring its data assets: hierarchical browsing, graph navigation, faceted browsing, and tabular browsing. These paradigms are useful for different tasks, cover different use cases, and are implemented by reusing and/or developing Open Source libraries and applications.