The research domains information retrieval and information visualization have always been
independent from each other. However they have the potential to be mutually beneficial. With
this in mind a writer school was organized in Zinal Switzerland in January 2012 within the
context of the EU-funded research project PROMISE (Participative Research Laboratory for
Multimedia and Multilingual Information Systems Evaluation). PROMISE aims at advancing the
experimental evaluation of complex multimedia and multilingual information systems in order to
support individuals commercial entities and communities who design develop employ and
improve such complex systems. The overall goal of PROMISE is to deliver a unified environment
collecting data knowledge tools and methodologies and to help the user community involved
in experimental evaluation. This book constitutes the outcome of the PROMISE Winter School 2012
and contains 11 invited lectures from the research domains information retrieval and
information visualization. A large variety of subjects are covered including hot topics such
as crowdsourcing and social media.
