Showing posts with label UIST07. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UIST07. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Methods of Collecting Internet Content

My UIST 07 paper is called Relations, Cards, and Search Templates: User-Guided Web Data Integration and Layout by Mira Dontcheva, Steven M. Drucker, David Salesin, and Michael F. Cohen.

This paper was about the three methods of organizing internet data that the writers had designed. The first is an interaction technique based on relations, linking different websites and allowing users to automatically extract content from these websites. The second is a way of merging content from these websites and being able to organize it visually in a way easy for the user to see. The third involves search templates to allow users to search faster for the information they want.

The relation-based interaction technique works when a user clicks to extract certain data from one website, and then gets information for the same company/restaurant/etc from a different website. They have the option of linking the two websites together. After that, when the user goes to one of the linked websites, the program will automatically pull the related information from the other website(s).



The organization of the content of these websites is done with the second method. A card is created with this information. Then the user can organize the data on these cards in any order they want. After they set the first card, all other cards will be set up the same way.


The search templates work similarly. They start with having a card and search template which has relations in it that say what website information goes where. Then the user can select a search template and type in their search query.



This seems like a very useful piece of software. It would enable many people to do more efficient searches that would save them a lot of time.