A Geo-Contextualized Multi-Genre Scientific Search Engine: A Novel Conceptual Design and Prototype Evaluation

Abstract

Scientific research is nowadays challenging due to the overwhelming access to information. Current scientific search tools have two shortcomings: (1) they lack a contextualized search framework where the user can search based on geolocation, and (2) they do not interconnect different text genres (e.g., publications and blogs). To tackle these issues, this paper presents a novel, generic conceptual design for a scientific search tool that is applicable to any domain. Our approach focuses on two main components within the search engine: (1) steering search results towards geolocation-oriented search where location expressions are extracted from the user query and used within the search process, and (2) enabling multi-genre text retrieval to increase synergy discovery. We built a prototype for the earth observation and science domain, where geolocation is salient. Our qualitative evaluations show the benefits of visually representing scientific research on map views, but they also reveal crucial points to improve our design further.