The Invisible Web Weblog

Journal of Information Retrieval is going to publish a special Issue on "Non-English Web Retrieval". This issue will focus on evaluation, user search behaviour, query log analysis, indexing, information extraction, summarization, user studies, retrieval models, question answering, natural language processing, concept based image retrieval, creation of multi-lingual web collections, intranet/enterprise search, text categorization and clustering and cross language and multilingual retrieval.

SIGIR 2008 Workshop on Aggregated Search will take place in July 24, Singapore.

The 21st Tehran International Book Fair (TIBF) will take place 2 -12 May 2008. For more information please have a look at TIBF website (http://www.tibf.ir/).

Following my previous works on Web Search Research, this paper was recently published in the Electronic Library: Mansourian, Y. (2008). Contextualization of web searching: a grounded theory approach, The Electronic Library, Vol. 26 No. 2 pp. 202-214. Abstract: Purpose – This paper aims to report selective findings of a wider study on interaction of users with web-based search tools to underline the importance of context in information seeking on the web and to introduce some of the contextual elements of web search context. Design/methodology/approach – A series of intensive and in-depth interviews was carried out with a sample of the Biology Community at the University of Sheffield. Critical Incident Technique (CIT) was employed in the interview protocol and the collected data was inductively analyzed in the light of Grounded Theory approach. Findings – The results strongly suggest that considering the context of search is a pivotal factor in understanding users' behaviours, feeli...

IADIS International Conference of e-Society 2008 takes place in Algarve, Portugal from 9-12 April 2008. For more details please see the conference website (www.esociety-conf.org/).

The latest progress in web-based search industry is always one of my favourite areas of study. If you look through the related literature you can see various techniques claiming better search results. However, I think what we really need is new search engines which are able to make sense of what we ask them. This approach is called differently in various sources such as "Search 2.0" or "Semantic Search". Hakia compares this approach with the traditional indexing methods and concludes that: "Semantic search technology has many advantages compared to statistical (popularity) methods, especially when statistical data is not available such as in dynamic content and long-tail queries". I don't know how successful they have been in implementation of this new approach but for more information please have a look at this address .

Special Issue of the Journal of Digital Information will focus on "Digital Libraries and User-Generated Content". The special issue aims to "explore how digital libraries can leverage on the various technologies underlying user-generated content to provide innovative and useful services for their users. Since such technologies are potentially disruptive, the special issue will also investigate how support for user-generated content would impact digital libraries, their administrators, users and other stakeholders". Topics of interest include "Use of Web 2.0 technologies in digital libraries, mobile services in digital libraries, supporting digital library infrastructure and architecture, information retrieval and mining techniques, virtual worlds and digital libraries, user communities, usability and user needs, novel interfaces supporting user-generated content and social, institutional and policy issues."

Fourth International Conference on Webometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics (WIS) and Ninth COLLNET Meeting will take place 29 July – 1 August, 2008 at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institute of Library and Information Science in Berlin. To see more details please visit the COLLNET website.