Think outside the search box: A comparative study of visual and form-based query builders
Tanja Svarre, Tony Russell-Rose

TL;DR
This study compares visual and form-based query builders, showing visual interfaces enhance exploratory search and transparency, with implications for improving professional search tools.
Contribution
It introduces and evaluates a visual query building approach, highlighting its advantages over traditional form-based methods in professional search contexts.
Findings
Visual interfaces promote exploratory search behavior
A 'scratch' space aids query formulation
Visual tools can improve transparency and reproducibility
Abstract
Knowledge workers such as healthcare information professionals, legal researchers, and librarians need to create and execute search strategies that are comprehensive, transparent, and reproducible. The traditional solution is to use proprietary query building tools provided by literature database vendors. In the majority of cases, these query builders are designed using a form-based paradigm that requires the user to enter keywords and ontology terms on a line-by-line basis and then combine them using Boolean operators. However, recent years have witnessed significant changes in human-computer interaction technologies and users can now engage with online information systems using a variety of novel data visualisation techniques. In this paper, we evaluate a new approach to query building in which users express concepts as objects on a visual canvas and compare this with traditional…
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Taxonomy
TopicsData Visualization and Analytics · Semantic Web and Ontologies · Video Analysis and Summarization
MethodsOntology
