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If any of you happen to be in Berlin the last week of July (27-31), there will be a very interesting conference: Travels Between Europe and the Americas – “Fifth International and Interdisciplinary Alexander von Humboldt Conference” Freie Universität Berlin.

Apparently this is going to be a huge conference with more than 300 partecipants. Scholars from many disciplines, professors and graduate students interested in travels between Europe and the Americas will convene in Berlin and discuss their research.

I will have a chance to present some research of my master-studies in this conference as well. My presentation is included in Section B:Travels between Europe and Latin America (15th through 21st centuries). The focus of the presentation will be related to implementations in the Humboldt Digital Library (“Increasing the Effectiveness of Information Retrieval in the Humboldt Digital Library by Implementation of Multivariable Metadata”), July 29th, between 09.30-10.30.

The Programm can be downloaded in a PDF file.

The abstract of my presentation

Title: Increasing the effectiveness of Information Retrieval in the Humboldt Digital Library  by implementation of Multivariable Metadata
The usual practice of an internet website is that users have to follow several links to reach the searched information. In an evolving digital library such as the Humboldt Digital Library (HDL) the content and complexity of the library continuously grow. To guarantee the usability of the system and to increase the probability of finding the data, we have implemented a set of useful tools that facilitate the navigation to the required information in the HDL.
    One of the key components of the HDL is the information retrieval (IR) module. Based on studies, which have been pursued in the last years, our developments has been following a different focus, covering fundamentals like models of user behaviors, social bookmarking and sentiment based search, also referred in literature as affective orientation, semantic valence, and polarity. Each of these research courses explains a specific method on how to make the search more effective and improve the correctness of the results.
The IR module of the HDL is based on the incremental number of the variables that support the users to search for specific information. This is achieved by using metadata related to each paragraph. These metadata are automatically calculated by the system or manually inserted by the system administrators. Thematic variables, including time and location tags, are inserted manually in relation to each paragraph. Other data are automatically calculated by the system to provide statistics, search paths, navigation maps that are used in a case based reasoning engine.  The variety of these metadata in combination with a rich search interface and suggestive engines increase the effectiveness of the search results in the HDL.
To give an example how to use the IR module, every Internet user can create his own profile to be able to store personal bookmarks, store search paths to text paragraphs or illustrations, and define points of interest for thematic search.