CS 5604 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL Front-End Team Fall 2016 Final Report

Information Retrieval systems are a common tool for building research and disseminating knowledge. For this to be possible, these systems must be able to effectively show varying amounts of relevant information to the user. The information retrieval system is in constant interaction with the user, who can modify the direction of their search as they gain more information. The front-end of the information retrieval system is where this important communication happens.

As members of Dr. Fox's class on Information Storage and Retrieval, we are tasked with understanding and making progress toward answering the question: how can we best build a state-of-the-art information retrieval and analysis system in support of the IDEAL (Integrated Digital Event Archiving and Library) and GETAR (Global Event and Trend Archive Research) projects?

As the front-end design and development team, our responsibility to this project is in creating an interface for users to explore large collections of tweet and webpage data. Our goal in this research effort is to understand how users search for information and to support these efforts with an accurate and usable interface. We support various methods of searching, such as query driven searches, faceted search and browsing, and filtering of information by topic. We implemented user management and logging to support future work in recommendations. Additionally, we integrated a framework for future efforts in providing users with insightful visualizations which will allow them to explore social network and document interrelation data.