An Evaluation of Interfaces for Searching a Structured Information Resource

We have developed a model of clinical knowledge and organized an electronic surgical textbook, Unbound Surgery, using this semantic framework. In this study, we designed and evaluated five interfaces for searching Unbound Surgery. In general, clinicians preferred concise templates that allowed them to construct queries using components of the information model. Although they felt that a free text interface better captured their questions, participants were skeptical about its retrieval performance. Further research is needed to create the most effective and comprehensible interfaces for searching structured information resources.