Automatic indexing in e-government - VBN - Aalborg Universitet

Automatic indexing in e-government
characteristics of the domain. For this purpose we use a questionnaire for gaining an
overview of the organization. Subsequently, focus group interviews are employed in
order to explain and expand the results of the questionnaire survey. The questionnaire
is used to collect data on the employees’ frequency of information seeking, the types of
information needs developed, use of information sources, and metadata preferences in
relation to specific work tasks in the organization. The assumption is that importance of
information may depend on the work task in question. We refer to this first part of the
empirical foundation for the thesis as the domain study.
The second part of the data collection consists of a search test specifically
investigating the performance of the two indexing methods mentioned above. For the
design of the search test we use knowledge gained from the domain study in order to
qualify the search test design. The search test investigates the performance of two test
systems. Both test systems employ automatic indexing; one extracted (free text
indexing) and one assigned (automatic categorization). Three simulated and one real
search job forms the basis of the test persons’ evaluation of the performance of the test
systems. The relevance of the search results are evaluated by the test persons. The test
sessions are finished with a short interview.
1.2 Empirical assumptions
The empirical design of the PhD project has been guided by our
methodological starting point: the cognitive view of information seeking and retrieval
(cf., Ingwersen & Järvelin, 2005). The cognitive viewpoint is methodologically
considered within the research tradition of cognitive constructivism (Talja, Tuominen &
Savolainen, 2005). The cognitive viewpoint has emerged as a reaction to a biased focus
on users in the user oriented research tradition and on systems in the system oriented
research tradition. Thus, the cognitive viewpoint aims at a holistic view on the process
of IR interaction in order to achieve integration between the user oriented and the
system driven research traditions (e.g., Ingwersen, 1992, 1996; Ingwersen & Järvelin,
2005). The cognitive view emphasizes the cognitive actors interacting in information
seeking and retrieval. With this view of information seeking and retrieval, the users and
the information system must be taken into account when testing performance of an
information system. As a consequence we test the performance of indexing methods by
involving real, potential users in the search test. Further, we apply an established
evaluation method for the search test, namely simulated search tasks, which have been
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