Presented at the Taxonomic Databases Working Group Annual Meeting
Indaiatuba, SP, Brasil
October 20, 2002
Search Effectiveness in a Semi-Structured Taxonomic Index (FNA) (Oct 20th)
Sixty plant taxonomy students are participating in an experiment evaluating the effectiveness of search features over a semi-structured Flora of North America collection. The results will shed light on the value of providing augmented markup to flora. In a two by two design, subjects were randomly assigned to two treatment conditions. one condition is full document versus semi-structured search. In this condition one group will have the ability to search treatments for any word, the treatment group will have the option of searching separate parts of treatments such as the nomenclature, description, distribution and natural history. The other condition tests the effectiveness of automatic query expansion through the thesaurus published with the Flora of North America. The treatment group will have the option of having their queries automatically expanded though a database of synonyms, broader and narrower terms. This study is Funded by the National Science Foundation, Biological Databases and Informatics Program