This project is part of a wider research project whose focus is developing an information retrieval and analysis system in support of the IDEAL (Integrated Digital Event Archiving and Library) project. The search engine should retrieve results relating to tweet and web page data that have been collected by Dr E. Fox and his team of researchers from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The overall project has been broken into sub-projects and these smaller projects have been assigned to different teams. This portion of the project has the sole focus of research and development relating to the creation of the front end of the search engine. The front end is responsible for accepting search queries, logging user activities, displaying search results and presenting suggested content based on provided user queries and past user activity. In addition, we had to come up with ways to manipulate an established dataset to best give accurate results to users from varying levels of technical backgrounds without the expectation of having to learn a special system dialect beforehand.

During our final presentation, our team was able to give a live demo of a working system, which used the other teams’ data and methods to create a graphical and interactive user interface. We were able to manipulate the data to create the first functional user interface under the scope of this project and have given a base for teams in the future to work from and become more successful.

This submission includes a full report which entails the details for the direction and methods which were used to successfully create our UI as well as the slides from the final presentation given to the complete collective team at the end of our allotted time to produce a functional system.