TY - GEN
T1 - Information fostering – being proactive with information seeking and retrieval
AU - Shah, Chirag
N1 - Funding Information: This work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant IIS-1717488. Publisher Copyright: © 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2018/2/1
Y1 - 2018/2/1
N2 - People often have difficulty in expressing their information needs. Many times this results from a lack of clarity about the task at hand, or the way an information or search system works. In addition, people may not know what they do not know. The former is addressed by search systems by providing recommendations, whereas there are no good solutions for the latter problem. Even when a search system makes recommendations, they are limited to suggesting objects such as queries and documents only. They do not consider providing suggestions for strategies, people, or processes. This Perspective Paper addresses it by showing how to investigate the nature of the work a person is doing, predicting the potential problems they may encounter, and providing help to overcome those problems. This help could be an object such as a document or a query, a strategy, or a person. This whole process is referred to as Information Fostering. Beyond crafting a general-purpose recommender system, Information Fostering is the idea of providing proactive suggestions and help to information seekers. This could allow them avoid potential problems and capture promising opportunities from a search process before it is too late. The current paper presents this new perspective by outlining desired characteristics of an Information Fostering system, envisioning application scenarios, and proposing a set of potential methods for moving forward. Beyond these details, the primary purpose of this paper is to offer a new viewpoint that looks at the other side of the information seeking coin, by bringing together ideas from human-computer interaction, information retrieval, recommender systems, and education.
AB - People often have difficulty in expressing their information needs. Many times this results from a lack of clarity about the task at hand, or the way an information or search system works. In addition, people may not know what they do not know. The former is addressed by search systems by providing recommendations, whereas there are no good solutions for the latter problem. Even when a search system makes recommendations, they are limited to suggesting objects such as queries and documents only. They do not consider providing suggestions for strategies, people, or processes. This Perspective Paper addresses it by showing how to investigate the nature of the work a person is doing, predicting the potential problems they may encounter, and providing help to overcome those problems. This help could be an object such as a document or a query, a strategy, or a person. This whole process is referred to as Information Fostering. Beyond crafting a general-purpose recommender system, Information Fostering is the idea of providing proactive suggestions and help to information seekers. This could allow them avoid potential problems and capture promising opportunities from a search process before it is too late. The current paper presents this new perspective by outlining desired characteristics of an Information Fostering system, envisioning application scenarios, and proposing a set of potential methods for moving forward. Beyond these details, the primary purpose of this paper is to offer a new viewpoint that looks at the other side of the information seeking coin, by bringing together ideas from human-computer interaction, information retrieval, recommender systems, and education.
KW - Information Fostering
KW - Intelligent Assistants
KW - Proactive IR
KW - Task-based Information Seeking
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85052026299&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85052026299&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3176349.3176389
DO - https://doi.org/10.1145/3176349.3176389
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - CHIIR 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
SP - 62
EP - 71
BT - CHIIR 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 3rd ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, CHIIR 2018
Y2 - 11 March 2018 through 15 March 2018
ER -