Professional Collaborative Information Seeking: Towards Traceable Search and Creative Sensemaking

The development of systems to support collaborative information seeking is a challenging issue for many reasons. Besides the expected support of an individual user in tasks such as keyword based query formulation, relevance judgement, result set organization and summarization, the smooth exchange of search related information within a 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 satisfy an initial information need. In this paper, we briefly motivate specific requirements with a focus on collaborative professional search, review existing work and propose an adapted model for professional collaborative information seeking. In addition, we discuss the results of a use case study and point out major challenges in professional collaborative search. Finally, we briefly introduce a system that has been specifically developed to support collaborative technology search.