Automatic generation of research trails in web history

We propose the concept of research trails to help web users create and reestablish context across fragmented research processes without requiring them to explicitly structure and organize the material. A research trail is an ordered sequence of web pages that were accessed as part of a larger investigation; they are automatically constructed by filtering and organizing users’ activity history, using a combination of semantic and activity based criteria for grouping similar visited web pages. The design was informed by an ethnographic study of ordinary people doing research on the web, emphasizing a need to support research processes that are fragmented and where the research question is still in formation. This paper motivates and describes our algorithms for generating research trails. Research trails can be applied in several situations: as the underlying mechanism for a research task browser, or as feed to an ambient display of history information while searching. A prototype was...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: IUI
• Authors: Elin Rønby Pedersen, Karl Gyllstrom, Shengyin Gu, Peter Jin Hong
• Keywords: Fragmented Research Processes, IUI 2010, Research Processes, Research Trail, Software Engineering