An effort of communication measure for synchronous collaborative search systems

Abstract

Collaborative work in information seeking and retrieval scenarios is difficult to measure. This paper is about an initial attempt to evaluate the effort of communication, one of the most essential components of collaboration, over synchronous collaborative search (CS) sessions. CS is about explicit collaboration among individuals engaged in a common search task, using groupware technologies to satisfy the shared information needs. Strictly speaking, CS field is not limited to synchronous interaction because some situations are concerned with asynchronous, but explicit collaboration. Nevertheless we consider more attractive and novel the situations that requiring support to coordinate synchronous users' activities in CS systems to measure the effort of communication.