Harnessing User Knowledge In The Construction Of Rating Flows: The Design Of A Collaborative System Applied To Academic Repositories

Abstract

[EN] The artifacts developed over several ages, such as libraries, encyclopedias, and databases, show the cultural evolution of information systems. Compiling, organizing and visualizing information is a task carried out by mankind for thousands of years. The added difficulty in effectively communicating information in various sectors and services of our society reveals that an efficient communication of information is of the utmost importance in the current network society. The glut of information is directly related to the fact that the information that we are exposed, is not subject to a filtering and organization process. This reveals an urgency to develop strategies that not only prioritize the organization and searching, but also increase the efficiency of the communication process, in order to promote an efficient framework in the user’s cognitive and perceptual field. Therefore the task of designing complex information systems in an accessible manner, currently represents an important goal and an imperative task of the Design/er (Wurman, 2001), (Bonsiepe, 1997; 2000) (Rheingold, 2005), (Thackara, 2006), (Wright, 2008), (Castells, 2010), (Gleick, 2011), (Lima, 2011; 2014), (Meirelles, 2013), (Börner, 2010; 2014; 2015). The publication and the querying of articles, papers, journals, books, are an integral part of the research process. However, the querying and information visualization process in a scientific academic repository often proves to be a hard and inefficient task, because the wide range of results hardly fits in the user’s specific subject. However, if we equate that the knowledge objects are accessed by a significant number of users with a specific interest in a topic, and in the course of their research, each user handles a significant amount of results. It is then possible to consider the existence of a hierarchical and relational structure of evidences that emerges from the relationship established between the users, their specific interests and knowledge in a topic and the querying performed. Therefore, it is fundamental to consider the user’s experience and the leading role that it represents in the information filtering process.This paper aims to present key insights on the information glut problematic and proposes a new approach/system applied to the academic scientific repositories. A collaboration system is designed, in order to filter and visualize the rating flows based in the user’s experience, instead of the usual citation "object" centered approach. The focus of this work is to describe one part of the system, that is the experimental implementation of an interactive hierarchical structure.