Building a Search Support System for Cultural Properties by Visualizing Feature Words

Cultural Properties of Southern Hokkaido, one of the regional digital archives, is a website that aims to comprehensively collect and utilize information on cultural properties in the Southern Hokkaido region. Most of the visitors to the site access individual pages of cultural properties through keyword searches using search engines. More than 80% of the visitors leave the site after browsing individual pages. In this study, we aim to construct a system that arouses interest in other cultural properties among users browsing individual pages and supports their search for other cultural properties. As a means of arousing interest, keywords related to the cultural property being viewed are presented, and a list of cultural properties related to the keywords selected by the user is displayed. The keywords are obtained by hierarchical clustering of feature words extracted from the titles and descriptions of all cultural properties by similarity, and are used as labels for clusters that are highly related to the currently viewed cultural property. The hierarchical structure of the clusters of feature words is visualized using Zoomable Circle Packing, an interactive hierarchical visualization method, and displayed on the description page of the cultural properties to assist users to search for cultural properties of interest while grasping the overall image of the properties.