ASSIST: adaptive social support for information space traversal

ABSTRACT

Finding relevant information in a hyperspace has been a much studied problem for many years. With the emergence of so called Web 2.0 technologies we have seen the use of social systems for retrieval tasks increasing dramatically. Each system collects and exploits its own pool of community wisdom for the benefit of its users. In this paper we suggest a form of retrieval which exploits the pools of wisdom of multiple social technologies, specifically social search and social navigation. The paper details the added user benefits of merging several sources of social wisdom. We present details of the ASSIST engine developed to integrate social support mechanisms for the users of information repositories. The goal of this paper is to present the main features of the integrated community-based personalization engine that we have developed in order to improve retrieval in the hyperspace of information resources. It also reports the results of an empirical study of this technology.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Search process

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Selection process
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia
          Subjects: Navigation

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
classroom study, social navigation, social search