Multimodality and Vagueness in the Context of a Graphical, Object-Oriented Materials Information System

In the context of an extended understanding of information retrieval, multimodality and vagueness are discussed as key problems of materials information system development. The WING-M2 prototype is presented which combines an object-oriented graphical interface with natural language fe edback and correction functionality as well as additional components for graphical result querying and vague formulation of user needs. System development in WING-IIR is based on the rapid prototyping paradigm in combination with user tests in the application domain, materials information systems. Our design enhances traditional parallelized multimodal system structures by tailoring multimodality features to the respective advantages of different query modes. This approach seems to be of special importance for dealing with iterative retrieval strategies. Vagueness in user needs is addressed in different modalities: The graphical query module allows for visual specification of follow-up queries in line chart representations of factual data. It exploits the materials experts' visual interpretation of given data for graphical query formulation. The fuzzy-logic component of WING-M2 applies vague concepts to query interpretation in different modalities (e .g. by modeling linguistic variables like high as fuzzy concepts).