Activities

The long-term goal of the user interfaces sub-group is to create a single unified front-end user interface for the IR and summarization modules in the PERSIVAL back-end. Our first step toward this goal was to identify key features and requirements for the PERSIVAL front-end. The constraints that we identified allowed us to begin evaluating possible implementation strategies. Based on an analysis of the possible architectures, we decided that a multi-tier software infrastructure would be needed to accommodate a full range of multimedia material. We tested software technologies that might be used to implement this multi-tier infrastructure, wrote experimental JAVA code to compare the potential of using RMI, JAXP, Servlets, Activator Applets and XML, and evaluated session-layer protocols from various network services to perform component intercommunication.

An additional goal of the user interface team is to develop methods to map users questions to generic queries. The focus of this part of the study is a development of the framework that uses a generic query (GQ) approach in order to the support user's query construction process. GQ is a query template that reflects a good "answerable" clinical question. Current research is focused on the following issues:

• clinical questions model and user interaction
• how to store the generic queries in order to support future inferences
• measures of similarity between the user's information need and collected GQs
• integration of multimodal query interfaces