The Historical "Search And Retrieval" Meeting

On November, 27th 2007 the RiSE members had an historical meeting with Ruben Prieto-Díaz from James Madison University. They discussed important points about search mechanisms and which are the obstacles to be surpassed. In the following, we summarize the meeting:

Fred Durão started the meeting making an introduction of the first actions of the RiSE group in terms of search engine. He introduced the MARACATU, the first breath of search engine development. After that, he presented his MsC proposal showing how the use of ontology can be useful for improving the search precision.

Eduardo Cruz presented the B.A.R.T Search Engine, the commercial version of MARCATU, and also explained his MsC proposal that envisage a proactive search mechanism that exploits user context information to enhance the search.

Alexandre Martins talked about this ongoing work that is based on data mining technique to avoid unnecessary queries. In his work Martins analyzes the logs generated from the searches and extract patterns of relationships between query and retrieval. Thus it is possible the creation of association rules utilized for suggesting related assets in the regular search returns. Martins also empathized that the key point for the creation of relevant rules is to choose a good "window time" for evaluation of the search engine logs.

Yguaratã Cavalcanti also presented his MsC's proposal whose goal is to develop a tool for avoiding duplication of CR (change request). In general, the CRs are generated by bugs in the systems and reported in CR repository. Yguaratã pointed out that sometimes users rarely look for duplicated CR before reporting a new one and tools for avoiding such inconvenience are strongly advisable for software organizations that have hundreds of collaborators.

Cássio Melo showed his object of study which aims to develop a tool for automatic component extraction. Eduardo Cruz complemented the Cassio's speech by presenting the CORE system, a component repository system which motivates the Cassio's research. According to Cassio, software companies which intend to install a component repository have difficulty to store all of its assets in the repository.

Rodrigo Mendes had the most expected meeting with his (virtual) advisor; the hotspot of the discussion concentrated on how automatically produce relevant facets. Ironically, both researchers shared the same doubt and concluded that more research is needed. However they agreed at a point: a semi generation facet tool is the most viable way to apply a facet-based mechanism in a search tool.