Front-End Kibana (FEK) CS5604 Fall 2019

During the last two decades, web search engines have been driven to new quality levels due to the continuous efforts made to optimize the effectiveness of information retrieval. More and more people are becoming satisfied during their information retrieval processes, and web search has gradually replaced older methods, where people obtained information from each other or from libraries. Information retrieval systems are in constant interaction with users and help users interpret and analyze data. Currently, we are building the front end of a search engine, where users can explore information related to Tobacco Settlement documents from the University of California, San Francisco, as well as the Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) of Virginia Tech (and possibly other sites). This submission introduces the current work of the front-end team to build a functional user interface, which is one of the key components of a larger project to build a state-of-the-art search engine for two large datasets. We also seek to understand how users search for data, and accordingly provide the users with more insight and utilities from the two datasets with the help of the visualization tool Kibana. Already, a search website, where users can explore the two datasets, Tobacco Settlement dataset and ETDs dataset, has been created. A series of functionalities of the searching page have been realized, for instance, the login system, searching, filter functions, a Q&A page, and a visualization page.