Special Issue "New Search Paradigms"

Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Giovanni Maria Sacco
Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Torino, Corso Svizzera 185, I-10149 Torino, Italy
E-Mail: giovanni.sacco@di.unito.it
Interests: intelligent access to information; dynamic taxonomies and faceted search; e-commerce; multimedia retrieval; e-hrm; e-government; medical diagnosis; guided data mining; information retrieval; human-computer interaction

Dear Colleagues,

The enormous amount of data available online has made search tasks so pervasive that they represent a significant part of online user activities. At the same time, traditional paradigms such as the focalized query-answer search of traditional search engines, hypermedia and simple taxonomic access have proved inadequate to effectively support exploratory search, which is by far the most frequent search task. Exploratory search occurs in very diverse situations and domains where a simple answer is not sufficient because the result size is too large, or the query cannot be precisely framed, or the result really depends on different weighting factors as, for instance, in product selection in e-commerce. In all these situations, users need system assistance in quickly locating important information, in filtering irrelevant information, and in getting suggestions that improve the quality of the search task. This requires models that are effective but also easily understandable. In addition, usability and human factors play a very important role both in interaction and visualization. Dynamic taxonomies and faceted search are one of the most successful approaches to exploratory search, but by no means the only one.

This special issue of Future Internet focuses on all aspects of new exploratory search paradigms that can guide, simplify or expand user searches, including but not limited to:

• Dynamic taxonomies and faceted search
• Suggestions for search engine queries
• Clustering of search engine results
• Tag systems access and exploration
• Visualization and interactive exploration of results
• Integration of conceptual or geographic contextual information
• Integration of different exploratory strategies
• Evaluation of exploratory strategies
• Applications such as e-commerce, social networks, multimedia, e-government, e-hrm, etc.

Prof. Dr. Giovanni Maria Sacco
Guest Editor

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Future Internet is an international peer-reviewed Open Access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 300 CHF (Swiss Francs). English correction and/or formatting fees of 250 CHF (Swiss Francs) will be charged in certain cases for those articles accepted for publication that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections.

• exploratory search
• dynamic taxonomies and faceted search
• tags
• conceptual query result clustering
• suggestion of query terms
• visualization
• interactive exploration