UW iSchool talks / 4-5-06 / David Hawking / Does Topic Metadata Help with Web Search?

University of Washington
The Information School

You are cordially invited:

WHEN:      Wednesday  April 5, 2006, 3:30-4:30pm.

WHERE:     Mary Gates Hall Room 420  (UW Campus, Seattle WA)
            http://www.washington.edu/home/maps/northcentral.html?M
GH

HOST:      Efthimis Efthimiadis

SPONSORS:  The Information School and the ASIS&T UW
Student Chapter

TITLE:     Does Topic Metadata Help with Web Search?

SPEAKER:   David Hawking, CSIRO ICT Centre, Canberra,
Australia
                                           (
mailtoavid.Haw
kingcsiro.au )

ABSTRACT:

It has been claimed that topic metadata can be used to
improve the
accuracy of text searches.  Justin Zobel (RMIT) and I tested
this claim
by examining the contribution of metadata to effective
searching within
websites published by a university with a strong commitment
to and
substantial investment in metadata.  In this talk I will
report
experiments we conducted to measure the ability of subject
and
description metadata to contribute to effectively answering
four
different types of queries, extracted from the university's
official
query logs and from the university's site map.  Examination
of the
metadata present at the university reveals that, in addition
to
implementation deficiencies, there are inherent problems in
trying to
use subject and description metadata to enhance the
searchability of
websites. A follow-up experiment with the websites published
in a
particular government jurisdiction confirmed our findings. 
Our
experiments show that link anchor text, which can be
regarded as
metadata created by others, is much more effective in
identifying best
answers to queries than other textual evidence.

BIO:

David Hawking is the founder and chief scientist of CSIRO's
enterprise
search engine project (Panoptic: www.panopticsearch.com). 
Panoptic is
a commercial product permitting effective metadata and/or
content
search of heterogeneous enterprise information sources
including
websites, email, fileshares and databases.  Panoptic is now
installed
at around 50 sites in Australia, Canada, Britain and the US.
 It
provides whole-of-organisation search services for four
Australian
governments, many individual agencies, ten Universities and
the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation.  Private sector
customers include
Westpac bank, the Australian Stock Exchange and NineMSN,
Australia's
most-visited website.

In 2004 Panoptic won an Australian Information Industry
Association's
iNNOVATION award in Australia and Editor's Choice and
Well-Connected
awards from Network Computing magazine in the US.

Dr Hawking leads the very active research program which is
central to
Panoptic's growing success.  He is an author of over 60
scientific
publications, sits on the editorial boards of Information
Retrieval
and Computational Intelligence and is a member of the
program
committees of many of the leading conferences in the areas
of the Web
search and information retrieval.  He reviews grant
applications in
Australia, Canada, Switzerland and the Netherlands.  He has
taught
graduate courses on a Greek island and in a Swiss ski resort
and in
2004 presented a successful series of industry seminars on
"Search and
Searchability".

David was a coordinator of the Web track at the
international Text
Retrieval Conference from 1997-2004 and has been responsible
for the
creation and distribution of text retrieval benchmark
collections now
in use at over 120 research organisations worldwide.  In
2003 he was
awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of
Neuchatel in
Switzerland for his contributions to the objective
evaluation of
search quality.  He won the Chris Wallace award for
contribution to computer science research in Australasia,
for the
years 2001-2003.

Before joining CSIRO, David managed projects in parallel and
distributed computing at ANU and at the Advanced
Computational
Systems CRC.  Prior to that he managed ANU's student
computing
facilities,
taught students, designed a building and developed a range
of software
systems for text processing, job queueing, student
management,
experimental analysis and bushfire location.  In his spare
time he
decodes obscure file formats, programs in PostScript,
procrastinates
over home maintenance and plays Ultimate.

Homepage and publications list: http://es.cmis.c
siro.au/people/Dave/



Location Information:

The lecture takes place in Mary Gates Hall Room 420. Mary
Gates Hall is
located near the center of the UW Seattle campus. View a
campus map of
the location. Paid parking is available in the Central Plaza
Garage
below Kane Hall.

Driving Directions: From I-5, take the NE 45th Street exit
(#169). Turn
east onto NE 45th Street. Continue east about one quarter
mile to 15th
Avenue NE and turn right. Head south on 15th Avenue three
blocks to NE
41st Street. Turn left at Gate #1 into the Central Plaza
Garage. Stop at
the gatehouse inside the garage for directions and a parking
permit.

The Information School,    Improving Lives ... Through
Information.
www.ischool.washington.edu 

Co-sponsored by the ASIS&T UW Student Chapter
(http://students.
washington.edu/asis/
<http://stude
nts.washington.edu/asis/> )



* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* 
Efthimis N. Efthimiadis <efthimisu.washington.edu>
Associate Professor    
The Information School, University of Washington       
Suite 370 Mary Gates Hall, Box 352840     
Seattle, WA 98195-2840, USA     
tel.(off.) 206-616-6077, (sch) 206-685-9937, fax.
206-616-3152
http://faculty
.washington.edu/efthimis
http://www.sigir2006.org
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* 
 

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