Adapting a Faceted Search Task Model for the Development of a Domain-Specific Council Information Search Engine

Abstract

Domain specialists such as council members may benefit from specialised search functionality, but it is unclear how to formalise the search requirements when developing a search system. We adapt a faceted task model for the purpose of characterising the tasks of a target user group. We first identify which task facets council members use to describe their tasks, then characterise council member tasks based on those facets. Finally, we discuss the design implications of these tasks for the development of a search engine.Based on two studies at the same municipality we identified a set of task facets and used these to characterise the tasks of council members. By coding how council members describe their tasks we identified five task facets: the task objective, topic aspect, information source, retrieval unit, and task specificity. We then performed a third study at a second municipality where we found our results were consistent.We then discuss design implications of these tasks because the task model has implications for 1) how information should be modelled, and 2) how information can be presented in context, and it provides implicit suggestions for 3) how users want to interact with information.Our work is a step towards better understanding the search requirements of target user groups within an organisation. A task model enables organisations developing search systems to better prioritise where they should invest in new technology.

Improving the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Web-Based Search Tasks for Policy Workers

“…Tasks were identified and characterised (RQ1) by performing a task analysis. The task analysis was performed by coding speech segments from the interviews, starting with a codebook developed in a study with council members [8]. The codes in this codebook are the task facets that were previously identified with council members.…”

“…The faceted task model was extended with domain-specific facets. This was used to identify search requirements and develop a search system [8] as shown in Figure 2. The faceted task model was expanded with domain-specific facets based on how council members described their own tasks.…”

“…It is also unclear to them when they have found all useful information [27]. PWs are experts with less search literacy than expected of professional searchers [8,28,29], and their thoroughness can be limited due to time pressures [27]. When characterised based on their types of knowledge, PWs are considered experts with high declarative (what is it) and procedural (how to do it) domain knowledge, moderate declarative search knowledge (where to find it), and various levels of procedural search knowledge (successful ways to find it) [8,15].…”

“…Less investigated is how to connect these two worlds: how to develop a domain-specific search engine based on a task analysis. In previous work, a task analysis was proposed to facilitate the design of a search engine for council members [8]. The current work extends and refines this approach while using it to design a search engine for policy workers at a municipality.…”

A Comprehensive Survey of Facet Ranking Approaches Used in Faceted Search Systems

“…One of the most well-known FSSs, Flamenco, sorts the facets and facet values alphabetically [5,39]. This approach is still followed by many current FSSs, e.g., [60][61][62]. Arranging facets and facet values by frequencies in the dataset is adopted by several systems, including VisiNav, faceted Wikipedia, and many others [8,12].…”