Evaluation of Digital Government Access Systems

Fred Conrad
Moderators: Peter Sommer (Digital Government Research Center and Columbia University Center for New Media Teaching and Learning; sommer@columbia.edu) and Judith Klavans (Digital Government Research Center and Columbia University Center for Research on Information Access; klavans@cs.columbia.edu)

The development of new ways to integrate complex information raises the question of how to display and access this information in a way which is intuitive and useful for the user population. This session will focus on raising key research and practical questions for users within the context of digital government applications. We will focus specifically on the use of large ontologies and metadata for browsing, and on ways to display and browse this complex information. How can improved access be evaluated? How can new interfaces be evaluated? How can evaluation inform system design?