Masterarbeit
Improving the user interface experience in providing concepts to describe a research dataset in a structured semantic way
Completion
2021/03
Research Area
Intelligent Information Management
Students
Zahra Hassanjoulaee
Advisers
Description
When publishing scientific datasets, researchers are encouraged to provide additional details about certain characteristics of these scientific artifacts, as they are normally not self-descriptive. However, such a meta data description nowadays commonly comprises a title, some information about the author and institution, some other administrative or citational metadata, some simple and maybe ambiguous keywords and an unstructured description of the main content. This is an obstacle for further discovery and filter operations when other beneficiarians search for existing relevant datasets but can only filter for very general criteria such as the knowledge domain or the resource type, because other structured information is not broadly requested in established user interfaces, which also hinders interdisciplinary reuse.
Instead, it would be a benefit, if scientists are able to provide a more detailed, explicit, structured description of the content and the background of the research dataset when publishing a new artifact. Standardized terminologies already exist in multiple knowledge disciplines, that organize particular concepts hierarchically and group them under multiple aspects. The objective of this thesis project is to do research on alternative user input interfaces which allow a user to quickly and interactively provide a list of relevant aspects and concrete concepts that describe the nature of the published research dataset such as the media type, data license, examined objects, recording device, research objectives, data aquisition method, evaluation method and other relevant parameters.
After a requirement and state-of-the-art analysis, a concept has to be developed, how such an alternative frontend concept input interface can be designed so that it can be included in other static web forms and returns a list of user-descriped dimensions together with selected concept labels and identifiers. An implementation and evaluation has to show the feasibility and acceptance of the approach with regards to an improved user input interface experience in comparison to traditional static web form input elements for research dataset meta-description.
