Towards a Framework for Building Collaborative Information Searching Systems

Abstract

If the World Wide Web (the web for short), should become the world wide digital library, not only effective and effecient information searching techniques are needed, but also an adequate collaboration support that enable people to cooperate and collaborate in locating relevant information just as they do in physical libraries. Collaboration support is required during information searching as well as for sharing results of previous searching process. Collaborative information searching (CIS) can be either direct or indirect. In direct collaboration, people communicate directly, in synchronous or asynchronous manner, in order to show one another where to go to find a given information or simply to send to one another the required information. In indirect collaboration information gathered from previous information searching process conducted a user are used to help other users in their searching activities. Recommender systems are an example of indirect CIS systems. In this work we address the problem of providing a framework that facilitates the design and the implementation of various CIS applications. An overview of this framework, called, Broadway*Tools is presented in the next section.

Our approach consists on providing a set of object-oriented reusable components (or tools) that implements main services required for CIS. Today, Broadway*Tools provides four groups of tools set: -Server tools: these include a recommendation server, a user profile and session manager server, a page information server, and an annotation server.