TIIARA: A New Bilingual Taxonomy for Image Indexingt

摘要

This paper presents the final phase of a research project that aims to develop a bilingual taxonomy (English and French) for the indexing of ordinary digital images. The objective of this last stage was to ask a representative sample of image searchers to complete retrieval tasks of images indexed using the new taxonomy TIIARA to measure its degree of effectiveness and efficiency. During this experiment, a sample of 60 participants were asked to indicate where in the taxonomic structure they thought they would find each one of the 30 images shown. Respondents also completed a questionnaire intended to obtain their general opinion on TIIARA and to report any difficulties encountered during the retrieval process. The quantitative data was analyzed according to statistical methods, while the content of the open-ended questions was analyzed and coded to identify emergent themes. The findings of this ultimate phase of the research project indicated that, despite the fact that some categories still need further refining, TIIARA already constitutes a successful tool that provides access to ordinary images. Furthermore, the bilingual taxonomy constitutes a definite benefit for image searchers who are not very familiar with images indexed in English, which is still the dominant language of the Web.