CA557: Information Access

A module taught during Semester II of 2007/2008 by Prof. Alan Smeaton, to the M.Sc. in Electronic Commerce (Technical and Business), European M.Sc. in Business Informatics and M.Sc. in Software Engineering classes at Dublin City University

The formal module description is available online, and this is what it says about the course syllabus:

What is information access in the context of eCommerce ? Information access now - types of information access people are doing - principally web search - hypertext searching vs DB searching: Web searching and web search engines -text-based IR, boolean, weighted terms, ranking, Hal Varian''s economics of search, using links information in web searching, question-answering (TREC); Information access to non-text - Audio Image and Video leading on to digital TV and covering encoding formats and current technologies for capturing, storing, presenting and accessing such media; Databases - relational - info access to non-structured - basic organisation of information as tables with foreign/primary keys and constraints - take a complex worked example, suchas NAPSTER and show it as a R.DBMS, just for illustration; Data mining from web usage information -what information can we extract from webusage, and how, and what can we use it for; XML and XML databases - all the history, the terminology, the status, the trends - how XML is/can be used in B2B, CEC (consumer-oriented eCommerce) -what are the pitfalls and the potential, and we''ll use DCU as a worked example.

This syllabus is very ecommerce focussed, but the course is now broader (MSE, EBBIN) but still essentially about information access. This page mostly contains links to materials for the course including notes used in class and PPTs used also.

There is also a link to information about the continuous assessment (online 12 March 2008).

Course Materials

Chapter 2 - notes and PPTs (online 21 Feb 2008);

Chapter 3 - notes and PPTs (online 21 Feb 2008) and the video I use on the Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us (online 28 Feb)

Chapter 4 - notes and PPTs (online 12 March 2008) and another video on IR from early web to now

These are also some useful links to which I have referred during class. Some (ACM Digital Library for example) are only available from within the DCU intranet. Some of the material in the notes is taken from the European Summer School in IR in 2005 in DCU

Chapter 5 - Content Access to Multiple Media (online 28 April 2008);

Chapter 6 - 4 hot topics in Information Access (online 28 April 2008);

• Hal Bergel's Communications of the ACM article from May 2000 on "Predatory Disintermediation" (PDF, 448k) [available on-campus only]

• Article by Silverstein and Henzinger on an Analysis of a Search Engine Log from AltaVista ... what do people search for ... approx 1,000,000,000 user queries !
• Hal Varian's article on "Economics and Search" from ACM SIGIR Forum, 1999 (PDF format);
• Andrei Broder's taxonomy of web searching in ACM SIGIR Forum 2002 (PDF);
• Monika Henziner's excellent article on the challenges in web searching, including some of the tricks Google uses, also in ACM SIGIR Forum 2002 (PDF);
• SearchEngineWatch ... keeping tabs on search engine developments, a more commercial spin on monitoring the search engines;
• Kieran McDonald has a page pointing to books on video retrieval, very useful

• The QBIC image retrieval system from IBM;
• The TREC Video Retreival Evaluations (TRECVID) coordinate evaluation of video retrieval evaluations;
• The CuVid system developed by Columbia University;

Where to get video

• The Internet Movie Archive has gathered a collection of over 30,000 video programs;
• The OpenVideo project at the University of North Carolina, NC;
• The Public Domain Torrents of classic and B-movies;
• The Vanderbilt University Television News Archive holds more than 30,000 evening news broadcasts from sources such as ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN,

• The definitive guide to XML and the FAQ on the subject;