Towards a Model of Understanding Social Search

Search engine researchers typically depict search as the solitary activity of an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey of 150 users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service suggest that social interactions play an important role throughout the search process. Our main contribution is that we have integrated models from previous work in sensemaking and information seeking behavior to present a canonical social model of user activities before, during, and after search, suggesting where in the search process even implicitly shared information may be valuable to individual searchers.Comment: Presented at 1st Intl Workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking, 2008 (arXiv:0908.0583

Recommendation, collaboration and social search

This chapter considers the social component of interactive information retrieval: what is the role of other people in searching and browsing? For simplicity we begin by considering situations without computers. After all, you can interactively retrieve information without a computer; you just have to interact with someone or something else. Such an analysis can then help us think about the new forms of collaborative interactions that extend our conceptions of information search, made possible by the growth of networked ubiquitous computing technology. Information searching and browsing have often been conceptualized as a solitary activity, however they always have a social component. We may talk about 'the' searcher or 'the' user of a database or information resource. Our focus may be on individual uses and our research may look at individual users. Our experiments may be designed to observe the behaviors of individual subjects. Our models and theories derived from our empirical analyses may focus substantially or exclusively on an individual's evolving goals, thoughts, beliefs, emotions and actions. Nevertheless there are always social aspects of information seeking and use present, both implicitly and explicitly. We start by summarizing some of the history of information access with an emphasis on social and collaborative interactions. Then we look at the nature of recommendations, social search and interfaces to support collaboration between information seekers. Following this we consider how the design of interactive information systems is influenced by their social elements

Division of labour and sharing of knowledge for synchronous collaborative information retrieval

Synchronous collaborative information retrieval (SCIR) is concerned with supporting two or more users who search together at the same time in order to satisfy a shared information need. SCIR systems represent a paradigmatic shift in the way we view information retrieval, moving from an individual to a group process and as such the development of novel IR techniques is needed to support this. In this article we present what we believe are two key concepts for the development of effective SCIR namely division of labour (DoL) and sharing of knowledge (SoK). Together these concepts enable coordinated SCIR such that redundancy across group members is reduced whilst enabling each group member to benefit from the discoveries of their collaborators. In this article we outline techniques from state-of-the-art SCIR systems which support these two concepts, primarily through the provision of awareness widgets. We then outline some of our own work into system-mediated techniques for division of labour and sharing of knowledge in SCIR. Finally we conclude with a discussion on some possible future trends for these two coordination techniques

Evaluating Collaborative Information Seeking Interfaces with a Search-Oriented Inspection Method and Re-framed Information Seeking Theory

Despite the many implicit references to the social contexts of search within Information Seeking and Retrieval research, there has been relatively little work that has specifically investigated the additional requirements for collaborative information seeking interfaces. Here, we re-assess a recent analytical inspection framework, designed for individual information seeking, and then apply it to evaluate a recent collaborative information seeking interface: SearchTogether. The framework was built upon two models of solitary information seeking, and so as part of the re-assessment we first re-frame the models for collaborative contexts. We re-frame a model of search tactics, providing revised definitions that consider known collaborators. We then re-frame a model of user profiles to analyse support for different group dynamics. After presenting an analysis of SearchTogether, we reflect on its accuracy, showing that the framework identified 8 known truths, 8 new insights, and no known-to-be-untrue insights into the design. We conclude that the framework a) can still be applied to collaborative information seeking interfaces; b) can successfully produce additional requirements for collaborative information seeking interfaces; and c) can successfully model different dynamics of collaborating searchers

A Domain Specific Language for Orchestrating User Tasks Whilst Navigation Web Sites

International audienceIn this paper we claim that there are a lot of processes over Web applications that require a high level of coordination between individuals and tasks featuring procedures. We propose hereafter a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for describing the asynchronous orchestration users’ tasks including manual users’ tasks (i.e. simple instructions that tell users what to do during the navigation) and automated tasks (i.e. tasks that can be partially or completely automated by client-side scripts). The approach is illustrated by examples and a case study showing the tools, for which an empiric evaluation is presented

Tracking epistemic beliefs and sensemaking in collaborative information retrieval

Collaborative information retrieval is an area of increasing interest. However, the wider sensemaking context in which it occurs is understudied. Furthermore, the role of users’ beliefs about the domain they are querying, its structure, stability, complexity, and justifications – their epistemic beliefs – has been little studied in either individual or collaborative IR software development contexts. Here we discuss a tool to combine the knowledge mapping tool Cohere, with reference management capabilities through which the iterative, epistemically germane, potentially (but not necessarily) collaborative IR process may be ‘brought out’ both for sensemaking, and research purposes

Collaborative information system: connecting the government, university, and industry

The study explores the concept of collaborative information system among three main partners such as the government, universities and industries, which are involved in human capital development and workforce employment in any country. The idea of having collaboration among all these partners in information system is really vital, as in isolation those three big icons cannot produce optimum output for a country. The prime objective of this study is to investigate the possibility of collaborating the Government, University and Industry (GUI) at a standard online platform where each of them is able to access, exchange, and represent information for the greater benefit of the citizens for a particular country, especially in the context of Malaysia. The description of the partners includes the functionalities and information services offered by each of the collaborative icon together with brief concept of implementation mechanism. As the expected outcome, the citizens would get ample information based on their needs. The discussion incorporates the justification of why three partners have been chosen for collaboration in this study. Finally, future implications indicate the direction of the design and successful implementation of this study