Discussion Class 9
Mixed Content and Metadata
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Discussion Classes
Format:
Question
Ask a member of the class to answer.
Provide opportunity for others to comment.
When answering:
Stand up.
Give your name. Make sure that the TA hears it.
Speak clearly so that all the class can hear.
Suggestions:
Do not be shy at presenting partial answers.
Differing viewpoints are welcome.
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Question 1: Mixed content
(a) What do the authors mean by “mixed content”?
(b) What is the traditional way to manage mixed content?
(c) Why is this a new problem?
(d) What relationship does this have to the results of the
TREC ad hoc experiment?
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Question 2: Mixed metadata
The authors of the paper state that mixed metadata is
inevitable.
(a) What do they mean by “mixed metadata"?
(b) What technical and social reasons do they give for
standardization being an illusion?
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Question 3: Information discovery in a
messy world
Web search engines have adapted to a very large scale. Other
techniques, such as cross-domain metadata and federated
searching have failed to scale up.
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What new concepts and techniques have enabled this
adaptation?
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What can we learn that is applicable to other information
discovery tasks?
Question 4: User interfaces
(a) What (if any) is the relationship between metadata
standards, user interfaces, and user training?
(b) How is it possible that free-text indexing, with
unstructured queries, can sometimes be more effective
than structured searching of high-quality indexes?
What do the authors mean by, "Powerful user interfaces and
networks bring human expertise into the information
discovery loop"?
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Question 5: New approaches
Explain the following new developments:
(a) Better understanding of how and why users seek for
information.
(b) Relationships and context information.
(c) Multi-modal information discovery.
(d) User interfaces for exploring information.
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Question 6: Relevance v. importance
Traditional information retrieval measures effectiveness
in terms of relevance.
(a) What is the fundamental assumption behind using
precision and recall to measure effectiveness that does
not apply with mixed content?
(b) Why is importance of documents a useful measure of
ranking with mixed content?
(c) How does this relate to the user’s information discovery
task?
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Question 7: Physical access to resources
(a) Why are the metadata and indexing requirements
different for physical resources than for online
resources?
(b) How do web search engines provide effective service to
users despite the mixed content and the absence of good
metadata? Would the same approaches work with
physical resources, i.e., not online?
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Question 8: Integration
The authors argue that content (data and metadata), search
engines, and user interfaces need to be designed as a whole.
What is the impact if they are developed separately?
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