This project investigated interactive query expansion within a GUI environment. It involved the design and development of new interface using the Motif window manager, and a set of C procedures which communicated with the Okapi search engine.
The interface was designed to exploit the windowing medium and make Okapi's functionality more accessible to the user. Separate, sometimes overlapping, windows were created to delineate the different stages of a search. The search process was presented in terms of a ``game-board'' metaphor where there was a strict turn-taking demanded of the system and the user. Results indicated that users had few problems with a windowing environment, though there was some dissatisfaction with the legibility of the display and with its overlapping windows [5].
Interactive query expansion was implemented by showing users the terms extracted from relevant documents, and allowing them to decide which ones should be added to the query for an expanded search of the database. The facility was taken up in only a small proportion of cases, and results suggested that giving users more control over what terms to include in an expanded search was not always beneficial. They tended to be highly selective, choosing only one or two terms. This made the expansion process less effective, since terms that users might not recognise as being important might actually be indicative of an underlying commonality between many documents on the same topic.
The Motif window manager and its associated development tools proved somewhat inflexible in that it was necessary to compile the interface definition along with the underlying C procedures. This made it difficult for the interface designer to work independently of the application programmer. The tools selected for ENQUIRE development (see section 2.1.1 below) are not subject to the same constraints.