Today's complex, information-intensive problems often require people to work together. Mostly these tasks go far beyond simply searching together; they include information lookup, sharing, synthesis, and decision-making. In addition, they all have an end-goal that is mutually beneficial to all parties involved. Such "collaborative information seeking" (CIS) projects typically last several sessions and the participants all share an intention to contribute and benefit. Not surprisingly, these processes are highly interactive.Shah focuses on two individually well-understood notions: collaboration and information seeking, with the goal of bringing them together to show how it is a natural tendency for humans to work together on complex tasks. The first part of his book introduces the general notions of collaboration and information seeking, as well as related concepts, terminology, and frameworks; and thus provides the reader with a comprehensive treatment of the concepts underlying CIS. The second part of the book details CIS as a standalone domain. A series of frameworks, theories, and models are introduced to provide a conceptual basis for CIS. The final part describes several systems and applications of CIS, along with their broader implications on other fields such as computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human-computer interaction (HCI).With this first comprehensive overview of an exciting new research field, Shah delivers to graduate students and researchers in academia and industry an encompassing description of the technologies involved, state-of-the-art results, and open challenges as well as research opportunities.
Compiled by world- class leaders in the field of collaborative information retrieval and search (CIS), this book centres on the notion that information seeking is not always a solitary activity and working in collaboration to perform information-seeking tasks should be studied and supported. Covering aspects of theories, models, and applications the book is divided in three parts:· Best Practices and Studies: providing an overview of current knowledge and state-of-the-art in the field.· New Domains: covers some of the new and exciting opportunities of applying CIS· New Thoughts: focuses on new research directions by scholars from academia and industry from around the world.Collaborative Information Seeking provides a valuable reference for student, teachers, and researchers interested in the area of collaborative work, information seeking/retrieval, and human-computer interaction.
