User friendly design of graphical user interfaces for indexing vocabularies in the social sciences (LingUI)

Project leader: Dr. Maximilian Stempfhuber
Contact: Dr. Maximilian Stempfhuber

Project description:

Indexing vocabularies, like thesauri or classifications, do not only play a crucial role during content analysis, they also serve as an important means for exact query formulation. To use them efficiently in his search for information, the user has first to become familiar with them and then select and combine the semantic concepts relevant for his information need. In the case of multi-lingual indexing vocabularies it is often not possible to provide a one-to-one translation of these semantic concepts, but rather alternative concepts have to be related which reflect the original semantics. As the indexing vocabularies differ for different languages, so will the query formulation do – which makes it very difficult for the user to compare and interpret query formulation and result set. The project therefore will use the social sciences as a test bed for developing a user interface concept for indexing vocabularies which – in addition to multi-lingual aspects – takes also inter-cultural aspects into account and and is transferable to other domains. The project is carried out in cooperation with Prof. DoWan Kim of PaiChai University in Daejon, South Korea.

Duration: September 2005 – August 2006

Funding source: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)