Hierarchy Query Result Based Navigation

Search queries on biomedical databases, such as PubMed, often return a large number of results, only a small subset of which is relevant to the user. Ranking and categorization, which can also be combined, have been proposed to alleviate this information overload problem. Results categorization for biomedical databases is the focus of this work. A natural way to organize biomedical citations is according to their MeSH annotations. MeSH is a comprehensive concept hierarchy used by PubMed. In this paper, we present the BioNav system, a novel search interface that enables the user to navigate large number of query results by organizing them using the MeSH concept hierarchy. First, the query results are organized into a navigation tree. At each node expansion step, BioNav reveals only a small subset of the concept nodes, selected such that the expected user navigation cost is minimized.