What to do when there's too much information

  • Authors:
  • M. Lesk

  • Affiliations:
  • Bellcore, 445 south St, Morristown, NJ

  • Venue:
  • HYPERTEXT '89 Proceedings of the second annual ACM conference on Hypertext
  • Year:
  • 1989

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Hypertext systems with small units of text are likely to drown the user with information, in the same way that online catalogs or bibliographic retrieval systems often do. Experiments with a catalog of 800,000 book citations have shown two useful ways of dealing with the “too many hits” problem. One is a display of phrases containing the excessively frequent words; another is a display of titles by hierarchical category. The same techniques should apply to other text-based retrieval systems. In general, interactive solutions seem more promising than attempts to do detailed query analysis and get things right the first time.