Title: How to benefit from small samples of web queries?

Authors: Karl Petrič; Teodor Petrič; Vladislav Rajkovič

Addresses: Ministry of the Interior, Special Library, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia; Department of German Studies, Faculty of Arts, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia; Department of Informatics, Faculty of Organisation Sciences, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia ' Ministry of the Interior, Special Library, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia; Department of German Studies, Faculty of Arts, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia; Department of Informatics, Faculty of Organisation Sciences, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia ' Ministry of the Interior, Special Library, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia; Department of German Studies, Faculty of Arts, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia; Department of Informatics, Faculty of Organisation Sciences, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Abstract: The basic goal of this article is to demonstrate the process of detecting useful ideas from small web query samples by combining different software tools. Our sample contained web queries made by users of the Special Library of the Ministry of the Interior (hereinafter SLOMI). The process of extracting useful ideas from our sample was partially guided by statistical analysis, partially by rather intuitive and collective descriptive evaluation methods. Several rich visualisation techniques were used to stimulate creative data interpretation. The collected data on the queried persons and their areas of professional interest in our sample were implemented into a customised thesaurus and a mind map in order to extract useful ideas.

Keywords: web usage mining; information retrieval; idea discovery; social networks; thesauri; mind mapping; web queries; small samples; visualisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWS.2014.066416

International Journal of Web Science, 2014 Vol.2 No.3, pp.181 - 201

Received: 13 Feb 2012
Accepted: 30 Jan 2013
Published online: 31 Dec 2014 *

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