An Exploratory Study of User Perception in Visual Search Interfaces Based on SKOS

Repositories are web portals that provide access to learning objects. Resources can be easily located through the use of metadata, an important factor to increase the ease of searching for digital resources in repositories. However, there are as yet no similarly effective methods in order to increase access to learning objects. The main goal of this paper is to offer an alternative search system to improve access to academic learning objects and publications for several repositories through the use of information visualisation and Simple Knowledge Organization Schemes (SKOS). To this end, we have developed a visual framework and have used the Organic. Edunet and AGRIS as case studies in order to access academic and scientific publication resources respectively. In this paper, we present the results of our work through a test aimed at evaluating the whole visual framework, and offer recommendations on how to integrate this type of visual search into academic repositories based on SKOS.