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

Tue Mar 21 15:45:08 EST 2006

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?MGH

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
                                           (
mailto:David.Hawking at csiro.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.csiro.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://students.washington.edu/asis/> )

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Efthimis N. Efthimiadis <efthimis at u.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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