Supporting the Exploration of Cultural Heritage Information via Search Behavior Analysis

Thematic maps, traditionally developed to present specific themes within defined geographical areas, are an interesting information presentation model for Cultural Heritage exploration because of the abstract view on the territory they provide. However, in order to cope with possibly heterogeneous user interests, they should be adapted to the individual user by including the relevant types of information, given her/his specific interests. In a previous paper, we proposed an approach to the integration of thematic maps in the OnToMap Participatory GIS (Geographic Information System), in order to support query expansion during an exploratory search task. The proposed maps were built on the basis of a survey in which we asked people to rate the relevance of a set of concepts to five main themes around which we developed the maps. In this paper we go one step forward and we propose a more general approach to information search support in order to automatically create thematic maps, based on the analysis of frequently co-occurring search interests in a search engine query log. This type of analysis supports the identification of clusters of concepts that people frequently search within the same sessions and helps the identification of co-occurring topics that can be proposed to users when exploring an information space. In this way, when the user browses a catalog of Cultural Heritage information, (s)he can both visualize the thematic maps relevant to the search context, and be guided in the navigation within types of information, looking for possibly complementary types of data to satisfy her/his needs.