A Visual Approach to Query Formulation for Systematic Search

Russell-Rose, Tony; Chamberlain, Jon; Shokraneh, Farhad

Abstract

Knowledge workers (such as healthcare information professionals, patent agents and legal researchers) need to create and execute search strategies that are accurate, repeatable and transparent. The traditional solution offered by most database vendors is to use proprietary line-by-line ‘query builders’. However, these offer limited support for error checking or query optimisation, and their output can often be compromised by errors and inefficiencies. Using the healthcare domain for context, we demonstrate a new approach to search strategy formulation in which concepts are expressed as objects on a two-dimensional canvas, and relationships are articulated using direct manipulation. This approach eliminates many sources of syntactic error, makes the query semantics more transparent, and offers new ways to optimise, save and share search strategies and best practices.

Citation

Russell-Rose, T., Chamberlain, J., & Shokraneh, F. (2019, March). A Visual Approach to Query Formulation for Systematic Search. Presented at CHIIR '19: Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, Glasgow, Scotland, UK

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: CHIIR '19: Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
• Start Date: Mar 10, 2019
• End Date: Mar 14, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Nov 30, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Mar 8, 2019
• Publication Date: Mar 8, 2019
• Deposit Date: Dec 3, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 5, 2018
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Pages: 379-383
• Book Title: CHIIR '19: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
• ISBN: 978-1-4503-6025-8
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3295750.3298919
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1361168
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3298919
• Contract Date: Dec 3, 2018