Chair: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (DE), Vice-Chair: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (ES)
Objective
The objective of this WG is to identify and critically review the aspects of next generation search related to distributed and social search.
Basic concepts
Distributed search is important in next generation search because it will provide services and operations being able to search and integrate multiple data sources and streams. In this COST Action federated search will be explored beyond the way that it is used in traditional Distributed IR, i.e. to provide a single merged list of multiple ranked results. Instead it will be explored as a method for retrieving information from distributed data sets, possibly operate and/or integrate, and finally deliver to the patent users desktop for using them in a parallel, coordinated way. On the other side Social Search is a recent addition to the search technology and refers to the type of web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions, contributions and digital social circle of users. When applied to web search this user based approach to relevance is in contrast to established algorithmic approaches where relevance is determined by analyzing the text of each document or the link structure of the documents. Social search is expected to become an important part of next generation search as friends and contacts are a key part of most users life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person.
This WG will focus on the issues that have been discussed in the two paragraphs above and more specifically to the adaptations of methods, processes and algorithms which need to be revised and created in response to the next generation search challenge. Specific user and information need scenarios will be devised to facilitate that process. Such scenarios will be used extensively in this Action and one short example is briefly described below:
Lynda, a Dutch patent lawyer makes a finding prior art search about a new toothbrush and wants to search patent databases in Asian languages such as Japanese, Chinese as well as in English, French and German (and, in principle, every other language in which patents are filed). Several multilingual data sets must be searched in parallel and their results must be presented in different result lists but also merged (after translation if necessary) according to their relevance. The patent lawyer works in a firm which usually makes patent searches of such types and she wants the previous search sessions of her colleagues to be taken into account together with the bookmarks and annotations they have created about related patents. With Social Search, next generation search must find relevant patent content from the Lynda colleagues and probably other specific contacts and highlight them at the search results. As Lynda inspects the search results she can run several types of Social Search by specifying different types of social attributes that will be calculated into the search and she can coordinate several parallel views of search results
Expected Outcomes
At the end of the Action a generic model, of how Distributed and Social Search should be applied in next generation search, may be derived.
