Dynamic Taxonomies for Intelligent Information Access

End-user interactive access to complex information is a key requirement in most applications, from knowledge management, to e-commerce, to portals. Traditionally, only access paradigms based on the retrieval of data on the basis of precise specifications have been supported. Examples include queries on structured databases and information retrieval. There is now a growing perception that this type of paradigm does not model a large number of search tasks, such as product selection in e-commerce sites among many others, that are imprecise and require exploration, weighting of alternatives and information thinning. The recent debate on findability (Morville, 2002) and the widespread feeling that “search does not work” and “information is too hard to find” shows evidence of the crisis of traditional access paradigms. New access paradigms supporting exploration are needed. Because the goal is end-user interactive access, a holistic approach in which modeling, interface and interaction issues are considered together, must be used and will be discussed in the following.