Overview of the INEX 2009 Interactive Track

Abstract

In the paper we present the organization of the INEX 2009 interactive track. For the 2009 experiments the iTrack has gathered data on user search behavior in a collection consisting of book metadata taken from the online bookstore Amazon and the social cataloguing application LibraryThing. Thus the data are more structured than in previous years’ experiments, consisting of traditional bibliographic metadata, user-generated tags and reviews and promotional texts and reviews from publishers and professional reviewers. Through monitoring searches based on three different task types the experiment aims at studying how users interact with highly structured data. We describe the methods used for data collection and the tasks performed by the participants. Some preliminary results of the interaction analysis are reported.