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About DIRECT

About
DIRECT for CLEF 2009

The data produced during an evaluation campaign of information access systems are valuable scientific data, and as a consequence, it is important to keep trace of their lineage since this allows us to judge their quality and applicability for a given use. As the data is frequently enriched by the addition of further analyses and interpretations, it is necessary to provide an effective way be able to cite both the data and any additional processing.

A Digital Library Systems (DLS) represents the natural choice for managing, making accessible, citing, curating, enriching, and preserving all the information resources produced during an evaluation campaign.

DIRECT, Distributed Information Retrieval Evaluation Campaign Tool, is a DLS for managing the scientific data produced during an evaluation campaign.

DIRECT not only manages the different types of information resources employed in a large-scale evaluation campaign and supports the different stages of the campaign, but also facilitates the sharing and dissemination of the results.

DIRECT is proving an important instrument to improve cooperation among researchers and to facilitate the transfer of scientific and innovative results.

The system has been designed to meet the following goals:
- to be cross-platform and easily deployable to end users;
- to be as modular as possible, clearly separating the application logic from the interface logic;
- to be intuitive and capable of providing support for the various user tasks, such as experiment submission, consultation of metrics and plots about experiment performances, relevance assessment, and so on;
- to support different types of users, i.e. participants, assessors, organizers, and visitors, who need to have access to different kinds of features and capabilities;
- to support internationalization and localization: the application needs to be able to adapt to the language of the user and his country or culturally dependent data, such as dates and currencies.