Workshop on Collaborative Information Retrieval
1st International Collaborative Search Workshop
The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in various
aspects of small-team collaborative search to share ideas, to stimulate research in
the area, and to increase the visibility of this emerging area. We expect to identify
promising directions for further exploration and to establish collaborative links among
research groups.
The workshop took place on June 20, 2008 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, in
conjunction with the JCDL 2008 conference.
Several participants presented position papers, which are available on this web site.
Workshop Themes
The workshop was organized around three themes—practices, models, and evaluation of existing
systems. We started with a discussion
(still ongoing) about terminology, about how to situate our work in the existing research
space. We also wanted to motivate our modelling and design discussions with real-world examples
of collaboration. We discussed examples from the healthcare domain, students, faculty members,
the military, and businesses such as pharmaceutical companies that conduct research.
We discussed several models of collaborative information seeking, including sense-making,
communication, and information seeking theory based on Marcia Bates'
Berrypicking theory.
Finally, presenters described several systems that implement various aspects of collaboration, including
using search paths, simulations of user behavior to model system performance, and characterizing properties
of groups that lead to more effective collaboration.
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