Evaluating the semantic memory of web interactions in the xMem project

  • Authors:

  • Francesca Rizzo;Florian Daniel;Maristella Matera;Sharon Albertario;Anna Nibioli

  • Affiliations:

  • Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy;Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy;Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy;Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland;Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

As the amount of information on the World Wide Web continues to grow, efficient hypertext navigation mechanisms are becoming crucial. Among them, effective history mechanisms play an important role. We therefore decided to provide a new method to access users' navigation histories, called xMem (Extended Memory Navigation), building on semantic-based and associative accesses, so as to imitate some of the features of the human memory. Such a memory may give users better understanding of the context of their searches, intermixing semantic aspects with the temporal dimension.The paper presents the experimental study conducted on the xMem approach to revisit the Web interaction history. Two controlled experiments have been performed with the aim to evaluate the effectiveness of the xMem history mechanism with respect to traditional Web browser histories. The results from the first experiment show a clear advantage, in terms of the time needed to complete a retrieving task, for the subjects that used the xMem prototype. Accordingly, users found retrieving previously visited pages with xMem more satisfying than using Web interaction histories sorted by the only time dimension. The results from the second experiment show the relevance in the process of information retrieval of clusters and keywords semantically related to the context of the search.