Orland Hoeber

• Professor at University of Regina

Our study examined and compared the type, process, conditions, and consequences of radical and incremental innovations in community sport organizations (CSOs), which are a type of nonprofit membership association. Interviews were conducted with the president (or representative) of 14 CSOs engaged with both radical and incremental innovations. Radic...

Interactive information retrieval (IIR) interfaces are commonly evaluated using questionnaires that collect post-task subjective measures such as satisfaction, ease of use, usefulness, and user engagement. Although the importance of measuring emotional responses during the search process has been recognized, incorporating this aspect into IIR user...

When undertaking complex search scenarios, the underlying information need cannot be satisfied by finding a single optimal resource; instead, searchers need to engage in exploratory search processes to find multiple resources by iteratively revising and reformulation their queries. This process of query refinement is particularly challenging when u...

In the context of sport events, several stakeholders’ reputations could be impacted by critical incidents, including event organizers, athletes, teams, countries represented by athletes, and sponsors. The purposes of this study were to develop an understanding of (a) how an event organizer, media, and the public framed a critical incident in a rhet...

While searching within digital humanities collections is an important aspect of digital humanities research, the search features provided are usually more suited to lookup search than exploratory search. This limits the ability of digital humanities scholars to undertake complex search scenarios. Drawing upon recent studies on supporting explorator...

When a serendipitous discovery is made while searching within a digital library collection (such as an academic digital library at a university), the searcher has a difficult choice to make: either pursue the serendipitous discovery or set it aside and deal with it later. If they take the first option, this breaks the flow of the primary search act...

Complex search scenarios and exploratory search processes are understudied within the context of public digital library systems. While the literature indicates that exploratory search is effective when undertaking complex search scenarios, the primary focus has been on searching conducted by students, academics, or professionals. In this paper, our...

While searching within digital humanities collections is an important aspect of digital humanities research, the search features provided are usually more suited to lookup search than exploratory search. This limits the ability of digital humanities scholars to undertake complex search scenarios. Drawing upon recent studies on supporting explorator...

When searching within an academic digital library, a variety of information seeking strategies may be employed. The purpose of this study is to determine whether graduate students choose appropriate information seeking strategies for the complexity of a given search scenario and to explore among other factors that could influence their decisions. W...

Introduction: Web search is a common activity in a mobile context. However, the nature of performing tasks in a mobile environment means there is the risk interruption. While the effects of interruptions on mobile search have been studied in recent years, the nature of such interruptions occurring in real-world mobile settings have not. Methods: Us...

While the search interfaces used by common academic digital libraries provide easy access to a wealth of peer‐reviewed literature, their interfaces provide little support for exploratory browsing. When faced with a complex search task (such as one that requires knowledge discovery), exploratory browsing is an important first step in an exploratory...

While it is clear that using a mobile device can interrupt real-world activities such as walking or driving, the effects of interruptions on mobile device use have been under-studied. We are particularly interested in how the ambient distraction of walking while using a mobile device, combined with the occurrence of simulated interruptions of diffe...

In this article, we advocate the development of underexplored collaborations between leisure and computer science scholars. Focus is placed on exploring and understanding digital leisure consumer behaviors and experiences and the potential for social justice research in the contexts of social media and eSport. Leisure scholars stand to benefit from...

Searching for images posted within social media services such as Twitter relies on matching textual queries to the contents of the posts that include the images. Unfortunately, social media posts may not always provide accurate or meaningful descriptions of the contents of the embedded images, making searching for images a challenging task. In this...

An important contribution in the development of interactive information retrieval as a research discipline has been the specification of information seeking models. A variety of such models have been documented, some of which apply generally to a broad set of search settings, and others which are specific to settings such as academic search. Within...

Natural language processing systems have the ability to analyse not only the sentiment of human language, but also the stance of the speaker. Representing this information visually from unevenly distributed and potentially sparse datasets is challenging, in particular when trying to facilitate exploration and knowledge discovery. We present work on...

As search tasks move beyond targeted search and into the domain of complex search, a substantial cognitive burden is placed on the searcher to craft and refine their queries, evaluate and explore among the search results, and ultimately make use of what is found. In such cases, information visualization techniques may be leveraged to enable searche...

The large number of environmental problems faced by society in recent years has driven researchers to collect and study massive amounts of data in order to understand the complex relations that exist between people and the environment in which we live. Such datasets are often high dimensional and heterogeneous in nature, with complex geospatial rel...

Large-scale qualitative-temporal research faces significant data management and analysis challenges due to the size, textual, and temporal nature of the datasets. We propose a systematic methodology that employs visual exploration to produce a purposive sample of a much larger collection of data, followed by a combination of thematic analysis and v...

While Wikipedia is an excellent source of information about entities, discovering relationships among them is not well-supported by its search features. Lensing Wikipedia was designed as an alternate search and summarization interface, providing a set of filtering, visualization, and exploration tools that enable searching among the connections bet...

Despite ongoing advances in information retrieval algorithms, people continue to experience difficulties when conducting online searches within digital libraries. Because their information-seeking goals are often complex, searchers may experience difficulty in precisely describing what they are seeking. Current search interfaces provide limited sup...

Comparing data collected on the movement of an entity to data on the location where the entity was reported to have been can be useful in monitoring and enforcement situations. Anomalies between these datasets may be indicative of illegal activity, systematic reporting errors, data entry errors, or equipment failure. While finding obvious anomalies...

Popular user-generated content services like Twitter have made it easy for people to post and browse short messages while on the go. However, the ability to search is limited by the query box and search results list paradigm. In this paper, we propose TwIST (Twitter Information Search Tool), which has been designed to support interactive search and...

Purpose – Due to the size and velocity at which user generated content is created on social media services such as Twitter, analysts are often limited by the need to pre-determine the specific topics and themes they wish to follow. Visual analytics software may be used to support the interactive discovery of emergent themes. The paper aims to discu...

Research question: The purpose of this investigation is threefold. First, as indications of the acquisition and creative use of knowledge, this study explores the extent to which community sport organizations (CSOs) are pursuing innovations. Second, these innovations are categorized based on their form, type, and magnitude. Third, the role that the...

Knowledge discovery in scientific and research datasets is an extremely challenging problem due to the high dimensionality, heterogeneity, and complex relationships within the data. When these datasets also includes temporal and geospatial components, the challenges in analyzing the data become even more difficult. A number of visualization approac...

We propose an approach for real-time sentiment-based anomaly detection (RSAD) in Twitter data streams. Sentiment classification is used to split the data into independent streams (positive, neutral, and negative), which are then analyzed for anomalous spikes in the number of tweets. Four approaches for evaluating the data streams are studied, along...

Purpose – Conducting academic searches within online digital libraries can be a difficult task due to the complexity of the searcher’s information need. The interfaces for such digital libraries commonly use simple search features that provide limited support for the fundamental strategies that academic searchers employ. The authors have developed...

Collecting multiple geospatial datasets that describe the same real-world events can be useful in monitoring and enforcement situations (e.g., independently tracking where a fishing vessel travelled and where it reported to have fished). While finding the obvious anomalies between such datasets may be a simple task, discovering more subtle inconsis...

Geographic phenomena often have an intrinsic temporal component that can be an important part of answering many research questions. Geospatial applications are well developed in their ability to navigate the spatial dimension of data through zoom and pan tools, but are less developed in their temporal navigation abilities. Improved temporal navigat...

Searching within large online document collections has become a common activity in our modern information-centric society. While simple fact verification tasks are well supported by current search technologies, when the search tasks become more complex, a substantial cognitive burden is placed on the searcher to craft and refine their queries, eval...

Position information is an important aspect of a mobile device’s context. While GPS is widely used to provide location information, it does not work well indoors. Wi-Fi network infrastructure is found in many public facilities and can be used for indoor positioning. In addition, the ubiquity of Wi-Fi-capable devices makes this approach especially c...

Ontologies are commonly used for knowledge representation and to exchange information between multiple applications. When the same information is represented by different overlapping ontologies, information sharing requires a mapping between corresponding pairs of entities. While ontology alignment algorithms have been developed to support such tas...

Many of the approaches to image retrieval on the Web have their basis in text retrieval. However, when searchers are asked to describe their image needs, the resulting query is often short and potentially ambiguous. The solution we propose is to perform automatic query expansion using Wikipedia as the source knowledge base, resulting in a diversifi...

Purpose HotMap web search was designed to support exploratory search tasks by adding lightweight visual and interactive features to the commonly used list‐based representation of web search results. Although laboratory user studies are the most common method for empirically validating the utility of information visualization and information retriev...

This work describes a novel fuzzy logic system designed to meet the real world demand of providing intelligent ranking to large repositories of documents previously encoded with non-fuzzy (crisp) metadata. The fuzzy logic prototype was tested in practice to complement the GeoConnections Discovery Portal, which is a web portal for specialized search...

The analysis of large movement datasets is a challenging task, because of their size and spatial complexity. This paper presents an interactive geovisual analytics approach named Hybrid Spatio-Temporal Filtering that integrates filtering of multiple movement characteristics, geovisual representations of the data, and multiple coordinated views to e...

Although association rule mining is an important pattern recognition and data analysis technique, extracting and finding significant rules from a large collection has always been challenging. The ability of information visualization to enable users to gain an understanding of high dimensional and large-scale data can play a major role in the explor...

People commonly experience difficulties when searching the Web, arising from an incomplete knowledge regarding their information needs, an inability to formulate accurate queries, and a low tolerance for considering the relevance of the search results. While simple and easy to use interfaces have made Web search universally accessible, they provide...

Studies of online search behaviour have found that searchers often face diculties formulating queries and exploring the search results sets. These shortcomings may be especially problematic in digital libraries since library searchers employ a wide variety of information seeking methods (with varying degrees of support), and the corpus to be search...

The field of granular computing deals with representing, organizing, and processing information based on different levels of abstraction or aggregation. In the domain of image search, an increasingly common approach is to organize and aggregate the retrieved images within multi-level structures. In this paper, we will explore some of the core princ...

This work examines a novel method that provides a parallel search of a very large network space consisting of fisheries management data. The parallel search solution is capable of determining global maxima of the search space using exhaustive search, compared to local optima located by machine learning solutions such as evolutionary computation. Th...

There has been little attention given to examining innovation under the conditions in which community sport organizations (CSO) operate. In this case study, the process under which one CSO undertook a technological innovation is explored. The purpose of this research was to classify the determinants that contributed to the innovation process, and i...

The conservation of wild fisheries resources in the face of an ever-increasing world demand for seafood requires the use of a number of management tools, including no-take zones, and gear, species, and temporal restrictions. One way of enforcing some of these regulations is through the use of Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data that provides enforc...

People commonly experience difficulties when searching the Web, arising from an incomplete knowledge regarding their information needs, an inability to formulate accurate queries, and a low tolerance for considering the relevance of the search results. While simple and easy to use interfaces have made Web search universally accessible, they provide...

A fundamental problem with current Web search technology is that in the absence of any additional information, the same query provided by two different searchers will produce the same set of search results, even if the information needs of the searchers are different. Web search personalization has been proposed as a solution to this problem, where...

Even though Web image search queries are often ambiguous, traditional search engines retrieve and present results solely based on relevance ranking, where only the most common and popular interpretations of the query are considered. Rather than assuming that all users are interested in the most common meaning of the query, a more sensible approach...

Traditionally, a genetic algorithm is used to analyze networks by maximizing the modularity (Q) measure to create a favorable community. A coevolutionary algorithm is used here to not only find the appropriate community division for a network, but to find interesting networks containing substantial changes in data within a very large network space....

In recent years, "folksonomy''-like systems such as Wikipedia and Delicious Social Bookmarking have achieved huge success. User collaboration is the defining characteristic of such systems. For indoor positioning mechanisms, we argue that it is also possible to incorporate collaboration in order to improve system performance, especially for fingerp...

Most approaches to image retrieval on the Web have their basis in docu-ment search techniques. Images are indexed based on the text that is related to the images. Queries are matched to this text to produce a set of search results, which are organized in paged grids that are reminiscent of lists of documents. Due to ambigu-ity both with the user-su...

Personalized Web search systems have been developed to tailor Web search to users’ needs based on their interests and preferences. A novel Normal Distribution Re-Weighting (NDRW) approach is proposed in this paper, which identifies and re-weights significant terms in vector-based personalization models in order to improve the personalization proces...

Many data sets exist that contain both geospatial and temporal elements, in addition to the core data that requires analysis. Within such data sets, it can be difficult to determine how the data have changed over spatial and temporal ranges. In this design study we present a system for dynamically exploring geo-temporal changes in the data. GTdiff...

While much work has been done on representing vessel movements, little work has been devoted to understanding and representing what particular movement patterns are associated with specific activities. Using fractal dimension as a measure of activity complexity, and velocity as a measure of activity type, it is possible to develop signatures for pa...

One of the fundamental goals of Web-based support systems is to promote and support human activities on the Web. The focus of this Chapter is on the specific activities associated with Web search, with special emphasis given to the use of visualization to enhance the cognitive abilities of Web searchers. An overview of information retrieval basics,...

This paper presents a novel approach for searching images online using textual queries and presenting the resulting images based on both conceptual and visual similarities. Given a user-specified query, the algorithm first finds the related concepts through conceptual query expansion. Each concept, together with the original query, is then used to...

A genetic algorithm is combined with two variants of the modularity (Q) network analysis metric to examine a substantial amount fisheries catch data. The data set produces one of the largest networks evaluated to date by genetic algorithms applied to network community analysis. Rather than using GA to decide community structure that simply maximize...

Object oriented software development is designed to be modular, with code reuse being very common. When bugs are introduced, they can manifest themselves in one or more sections of code, but originating in a completely different area. This poster outlines the features of ImpactViz, a novel approach for visualizing class dependencies and the impact...

Data sets that contain geospatial and temporal elements can be challenging to analyze. In particular, it can be difficult to determine how the data have changed over spatial and temporal ranges. In this poster, we present a visual approach for representing the pair-wise differences between geographically and temporally binned data. In addition to p...

One of the fundamental challenges in designing an image retrieval system is choosing a method by which the images that match a given query are presented to the searcher. Traditional approaches have used a grid layout that requires a sequential evaluation of the images. Recent advances in image processing and computing power have made similarity-bas...

Although static ranked lists remain the dominant Web search interface, they can limit the ability of Web searchers to find desired information when it is buried deep in the collection of search results. Web search visualization and Web search personalization are two active research directions that have shown promise for improving the user experienc...

In recent years, numerous visual Web search interfaces have been developed in the research community. How- ever, the user evaluations of these interfaces have been per- formed using a wide range of methods, making it difficult to compare and verify the relative value of the proposed advancements. In this paper, we survey these evaluation methods, a...

Although laboratory user studies are the most common method for validating the utility of information visualiza- tion systems, it may be difficult to determine if such stud- ies accurately reflect the tasks of real users. In this pa- per, we describe a longitudinal real-world user evaluation of a visual and interactive Web search interface designed...

Re-finding previously viewed Web pages in browsing his- tories is often a difficult task, due to the incomplete and vague knowledge people have about the information they are seeking. In this paper, we present a visual interface for the task of re-finding Web pages within browsing histo- ries. BrowseLine employs a novel two-dimensional timeline met...

TheHotMap.com is an example of a next-generation Web search interface, wherein users are able to take an active role in the Web search process. Information that can assist searchers in their Web search tasks is presented in a visual manner. The system supports user interaction both during the query refinement process, as well as the search results...

In recent years, there has been a move toward supporting the human element of Web search beyond a simple query box and a ranked list of search results. In this paper, we present a prototype implementation of an approach to Web search based on fuzzy clustering and visualization. CubanSea presents the searcher with topics that are automatically disco...

Although information retrieval techniques used by Web search engines have improved substantially over the years, the results of Web searches have continued to be represented in simple list-based formats. Although the list-based representation makes it easy to evaluate a single document for relevance, it does not support the users in the broader tas...

The primary focus of Web Information Retrieval Support Systems (WIRSS) are to address the aspects of search that consider the specific needs and goals of the individuals con- ducting Web searches. WIRSS moves beyond the traditional focus of automated searching within digital collections, ap- plying intelligent methods and Web-based technologies to...

Web searchers commonly have difficulties crafting queries to fulfill their information needs; even after they are able to craft a query, they often find it challenging to evaluate the results of their Web searches. Sources of these problems include the lack of support for constructing and refining queries, and the static nature of the list-based re...

Throughout many of the dierent types of Web searches peo- ple perform, the primary tasks are to rst craft a query that eectively captures their information needs, and then evalu- ate the search results seeking relevant documents. However, the top Web search engines generally provide little support for users in these tasks. WordBars is a next-genera...

In this paper, the features of T heHotM ap.com that sup-port exploratory Web search processes are described. This system grew out of two academic research projects that ex-plored the use of visualization and interaction as a means for supporting users as they conduct Web search tasks. In T heHotM ap.com, three lightweight interface extensions have...

Although significant efforts have been devoted to the study and evaluation of information retrieval systems from an algorithmic perspective, far less work has been performed on the evaluation of these systems from the user's perspective. This is certainly the case for Web information retrieval, where the major search engines continue to utilise int...

In general, Web search engines perform well for users whose information needs are well-defined. When searchers can provide specific terms that adequately describe the information they are seeking, the top search results are commonly very relevant. However, when users wish to explore a topic, little assistance is provided by Web search engines to he...

It has been well documented that Web searchers have difficulties crafting queries to fulfill their information needs. The VisiQ system uses a concept knowledge base produced using the ACM Computing Classification System to generate a query space that represents the query terms in relation to the concepts they describe and the terms that are related...

The interfaces used by the top Web search engines have changed very little since the early days of Web search. These interfaces follow the traditional model of informa- tion retrieval in which users first formulate their queries and then evaluate the search results. Little support is provided for the users' tasks of crafting and refining their quer...

The static list-based representation of Web search results remains essentially unchanged since the early days of Web search. This poster presents a simple and easy to understand visualization method to support users in the exploration of Web search results. A term frequency histogram provides a visual representation of the frequencies of the terms...

It is common for web searchers to have difficulties craft- ing queries to fulfill their information needs. Even when they provide a good query, users often find it challenging to evaluate the results of their web searches. Sources of these problems include the lack of support for query refine- ment, and the static nature of the list-based represent...

Users of traditional web search engines commonly find it difficult to evaluate the results of their web searches. We suggest the use of information visualization and interactive visual manipulation as methods for improving the ability of users to evaluate the results of a web search. In this pa- per, we present the results of a user study that comp...

Users of web search systems often have difficulty determining the relevance of search results to their information needs. Clustering has been suggested as a method for making this task easier. However, this introduces new challenges such as naming the clusters, selecting multiple clusters, and re-sorting the search results based on the cluster info...

While the information retrieval techniques used by Web search engines have improved substantially over the years, the search results have continued to be represented in a simple list-based format. Although this list-based representation makes it easy to evaluate a single document, it does not support the users in the broader tasks of manipulating t...

Most Web search engines use a list-based representation of Web search results, promoting a sequential evaluation of the document surrogates. Commonly, these search engines only display ten document surrogates per page, limiting the users' ability to explore the search results. We have developed two systems to support the visual exploration of Web s...

While the information retrieval techniques used by web search engines have improved substantially over the years, the search results have continued to be represented in a simple list-based format. Although this list-based representation makes it easy to evaluate a single document, it does not support the users in the broader tasks of manipulating t...

It has been well documented that Web searchers have difficulties crafting queries to fulfill their information needs. In this work, we use a concept knowledge base generated from the ACM computing classification system to generate a query space that represents the query terms in relation to the concepts they describe and the other terms that are re...

Query expansion has been extensively studied as a technique for increasing information retrieval performance. However, due to the volume of documents available on the web, many of the techniques that have been successful in traditional information retrieval systems do not scale well to web information retrieval. We propose a new technique based on...

As the world struggles with the Kyoto Accord and countries debate its ratification, it is individuals who will be asked to take more responsibility for their actions and the impact of those actions on their environment. In this context, “environmental risk” is used rather broadly to include not only overt risks, but also small and subtle ones encou...

The interaction model supported by web search engines has changed very little since the early days of web search. Users are required to formulate their queries with very little support from the system, and are provided with a list-based representation of the web search results that promotes a sequential evaluation of the document surrogates. The sh...

The fundamental idea behind personalization is to first learn something about the users of a system, and then use this information to support their future activities. When effective algorithms can be developed to learn user preferences, and when the methods for supporting future actions are achievable, personalization can be very effective. However...

This poster presents a set of interactive features that support searchers in exploring and refining image search results. The sys-tem automatically discovers from within Wikipedia a number of related concepts pertaining to the given query, which are used to retrieve a diversified set of image search results via query expan-sion. A set of visualizat...