CoSense: enhancing sensemaking for collaborative web search (original) (raw)
2008
Regarding the change of information seeking to a collaborative activity, DLs as dynamic information systems, have to adopt collaboration searching tools. This study investigates the degree of collaboration in information retrieval and the extent of collaboration tools usage in DLs. The collaborative tools of a prototype digital library are assessed through a qualitative study by the aspects of usefulness, usability and usage. Results show that information search transforms to a collective form, while they prove that usefulness and usability have a significant effect on usage and on user satisfaction. The results also show that collaboration tools evolve into indispensable design parameters for modern digital libraries. 112
Awareness in Collaborative Information Seeking
2010
Support for explicit collaboration in information-seeking activities is increasingly recognized as a desideratum for search systems. Several tools have emerged recently that help groups of people with the same information-seeking goals to work together. Many issues for these collaborative information-seeking (CIS) environments remain understudied.The authors identified awareness as one of these issues in CIS, and they presented a user study that involved 42 pairs of participants, who worked in collaboration over 2 sessions with 3 instances of the authors' CIS system for exploratory search. They showed that while having awareness of personal actions and history is important for exploratory search tasks spanning multiple sessions, support for group awareness is even more significant for effective collaboration. In addition, they showed that support for such group awareness can be provided without compromising usability or introducing additional load on the users.
The role of communication in collaborative information searching
Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2008
Collaboration plays an important role in the information seeking and retrieval activities within a team setting. In this research, we examined the impact of collaborative design features in two information retrieval tools that explicitly support collaboration. We designed the two collaborative information searching prototype, MUSE (Multi-User Search Engine) and MUST (Multi-User Search and Talk) and evaluated both systems. Results indicate that the communication (i.e., chat) function played an important role in enhancing the information seeking process by establishing common ground among group members. We also identified unexpected challenges that arose as the prototypes were used during these activities. These challenges were both technical and social in nature. We discuss implications for system design and directions for future research.
An investigation of search processes in collaborative exploratory web search
Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2012
Abstract This paper presents a user study aiming to investigate search processes in collaborative exploratory Web search. Our analysis of search processes focuses on the distribution and transition of user search actions captured in a collaborative web search system called CollabSearch. The results show that a large proportion of users' actions in collaborative searches were related to explicit communication, which is one of the sources for users to obtain query ideas. This paper concludes with some insights on the range of ...
Supporting collaborative learning during information searching
The first international …, 1995
We consider the role of collaborative learning during information searching. We report on observations of situated collaboration in a physical library, which informed the development of our system, Ariadne. This was intended both to investigate and support the learning of search skills. An iterative development and testing methodology was applied. The system has a mechanism for recording an interaction history of the search process. A visualisation of this process makes it easier for users to reflect, share and comment upon their understanding with others.
An Ontology-Based Tool for Collaborative and Social Sensemaking
Sensemaking activities of social networks involve network exploration and representation so, visual tools are designed to support these two activities. Existing social network analysis tools are usually weak in supporting complex analytical tasks and also in providing a collaborative environment for interaction. The analysis of data using a visual tool is rarely a task done in isolation, it tends to be part of a wider goal: that of making sense of the current situation, often to support decision-making. This paper discusses the storytelling design of a software environment to support organizations in sense-making activities and to support accidents investigation. A case study ACR-C describes petroleum industry employees investigating the root cause of an accident issue observed in one (or more) platforms. It is used throughout the paper as an example of human computer interaction where the ontology becomes a tool with domain knowledge to assist expert persons building a root cause tree leading to accidents. The framework will also provide with a collaborative recommendation module assuming that the users build up clusters based on their similar analysis in rating of items. A case study ACR-C describes petroleum industry employees investigating the root cause of an accident issue observed in one (or more) platforms. It is used throughout the paper as an example of human computer interaction where the ontology becomes a tool with domain knowledge to assist expert persons buildind a root cause tree leading to accidents. This paper reports the experience gained in ACR-C, a project that aims to support knowledge management (KM), sharing and reuse across different media in oil & gas industry. We report the storytelling design approach adopted and the design phases that led to the first prototype. A user interface was designed to assess how different levels of data, information and knowledge were mapped using alternative visual tools. The results show that a clear separation of the visual data analysis from other sense-making subtasks Copyright by the paper's authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes. In: Proceedings of the V Workshop sobre Aspectos da Interação Humano-Computador na Web Social (WAIHCWS'13), Manaus, Brazil, 2013, published at http://ceur-ws.org.. helps users in focussing their attention and comprehension of root causes of the problem. Further work is needed to develop more fully intuitive visualizations that exploit the richer information and make the multiple connections between data more easily accessible.
Model-driven formative evaluation of exploratory search: A study under a sensemaking framework
Information Processing & Management
The evaluation of exploratory search relies on the ongoing paradigm shift from focusing on the search algorithm to focusing on the interactive process. This paper proposes a model-driven formative evaluation approach, in which the goal is not the evaluation of a specific system, per se, but the exploration of new design possibilities. This paper gives an example of this approach where a model of sensemaking was used to inform the evaluation of a basic exploratory search system(s) in the context of a sensemaking task. The model suggested that, rather than just looking at simple search performance measures, we should examine closely the interwoven, interactive processes of both representation construction and information seeking. Participants were asked to make sense of an unfamiliar topic using an augmented query-based search system. The processes of representation construction and information seeking were captured and analyzed using data from experiment notes, interviews, and a syst...