Taco Ekkel, Director of Development, MediaLab Solutions BV delivered a lively presentation about the Aquabowser visualization tool. This tool has received popular acceptance both in Europe and in the United States as a navigational support in library catalog environments.
If you want to see this tool (and for visualization tools, actually *seeing* it is important), you can run a search or two on http://lens.lib.uchicago.edu. It is the product of MediaLabs, a small company that was acquired in 2007 by Bowker. The system allows users to indicate the context of their search by selecting terms from a dynamically generated word cloud. The system is also useful for purposes of faceted navigation via the refinement of a search.
Customers can use Aquabrowser as an integrated search and discovery interface on top of MarkLogic (see March press release about the partnership here). The partnership between these two organizations enables an out of the box solution, freeing clients from having to independently create a search engine and interface for their product. There is a simple interoperability between the two systems and a relatively short time frame for implementation. Aquabrowser draws on both the Lexicon functionality and the Thesaurus functionality in Marklogic 3.1. The presence of such a proven product as a layer overtop a publisher's content seems to increase usage and visibility of content, based on usage reports from the library environment.
It's useful to see how partnerships like this leverage the strength of both systems to support user success.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment