Topographic Combination of Images and Texts for Information Discovery in a Digital Library Context
Résumé
Digital Libraries are generally requested to provide access to a large variety of information. As a result, most of DL architectures are issued from Information Retrieval models and are designed to help end-users in retrieving information «he already knows but he has lost a link to». Then, a kernel strategy of many available systems or search engines consists in asking a user to formulate a preliminary query, as an initiate value, and to start an interactive process of reformulation. From an user's point of view there is a risk that he will quickly get lost if he has been too generic or imprecise. We therefore aim at building Information Discovering Systems rather than Information Retrieval Systems. To build up our own Information Discovering System turning to account the "outstanding explanatory power" of images in a multimedia context, we have experienced a specific synergetic approach mixing text and images for enhancing the discovering capabilties of the resulting system.