Interaction and navigation for a document database: a concrete case study

In this article, we present the application Wishbone, an innovative search engine to explore complex document database. Dedicated to the intranet document site of our society, we present in this paper how we managed to improve the request process by avoiding the “all or nothing” syndrome for a too fuzzy or too demanding request respectively, offering also the maximum of smoothness in the way the user formulates the query. We particularly focused our attention on the interaction between a web database and its users, either during a consultation or an interrogation process. This web context can be found in multiple environments like an intranet, a FAQs site, selfassistance, sale catalogues or document data bases. First we analyse document consultation sites in regard to quality criteria. In a second step, we describe our approach to furnish a software response to the problematic of settling, management and interaction of an online document database. All this work was accomplished using as example an enterprise document database with various documents like contracts, business notes and bug reports.