Professional collaborative information seeking: On traceability and creative sensemaking

Abstract

The development of systems to support collaborative information seeking is a challenging issue for many reasons. Besides the support expected for an individual user, such as query formulation, relevance judgement, result set organization and summarization, the smooth exchange of search related information within the team of users seeking information has to be supported. This imposes strong requirements on visualization and interaction to enable user to easily trace and interpret the search activities of other team members and to jointly make sense of gathered information in order to solve the initial information need. In this paper, we briefly motivate specific requirements with a focus on collaborative professional search, review existing work and point out major challenges. In addition, we briefly introduce a system that has been specifically developed to support collaborative technology search.