Exploratory search

Exploratory searchers have no specific target to look for, but there may be one when the searcher makes discovery during the journey of exploration. Exploratory search can be based on knowledge seeking in which the purpose is to acquire knowledge in the search process. ANTOM is powered by a domain ontology which contains about 7 million concepts which practically covers all domains of knowledge. You can perform exploratory search by exploring the concept map. Just click on “Concept” on the main menu and choose “Concept search”. Then input any concept you want to start with (Fig. 4). The first page of concept search result will be displayed (Fig. 5). If you click on a map icon  corresponding to a concept, the concept map will be displayed with the chosen concept at the centre (Fig. 6). The concept map can guide you to navigate through a network of related concepts by right click on its siblings and choose “Drill down”. When you click on a particular concept in the concept map, you will have a brief explanation of that concept. When you right click any concept and choose “List related documents” (Fig. 7), it will show you all documents matching this concept name (Fig. 8). Of course you must have uploaded some documents that are related to this concept before you can retrieve any document. This is a very versatile function in ANTOM as the system will automatically populate (associate) your documents to related concepts.

Fig [5]: Clicking on the map icon of a concept in the list (highlighted) will display the concept map as shown in Fig. [8]

Fig [6]: Clicking on any concept on the map will show the meaning of that concept and choosing "Full article" will bring you the whole page of detail explanation about this concept.