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

• Applied computing

  • Document management and text processing

    • Document preparation

      • Multi / mixed media creation

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction paradigms

      • Hypertext / hypermedia

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval

    • Information retrieval query processing

    • Retrieval models and ranking

    • Retrieval tasks and goals