Edward A. Fox Workshop Discussion Paper

Challenges

• Characterize, empower, and provide individualized support for users --- handling differences in language, culture, age, experience, education, cognitive style, physical capabilities, degree of interest/involvement, preferences, ...
• Study, characterize, generalize and formalize ways to handle user information needs / problems / anomalous states of knowledge --- going beyond queries, managing uncertainty / imprecision / ambiguity / incomplete information, dealing with various types of structuring (e.g., with patterns/templates/cases, grammars, constraints, clusters/classifications, schema).
• Develop a model or model framework for supporting users' search needs which: fully characterizes the many relevant situations, abstracts/generalizes current models, spans from passive (e.g., routing) to active (e.g., end-user searching) involvement, spans from personal information space management to global digital libraries, spans from anonymous transactions to sessions to life-long research support, incorporates learning by the user and system, and covers full-text/multimedia/hypermedia information.

Opportunities:

• Undertake a large-scale Digital Library Evaluation effort --- involving usability studies, log analysis, and other methods --- to determine requirements to support user searching and to characterize and specify user tasks that implicitly require search support. Note that this must be done with new search and digital library systems, so we go beyond old studies of Boolean and bibliographic systems, to cover: vector and probabilistic searching, relevance feedback, full-text and multimedia access, realistic size collections, ...
• Capitalize on the interest in Internet and WWW to connect searching work with closely related areas: hypertext/hypermedia, browsing/visualization, CSCW, resource discovery in distributed environments, database management, ..

Leverage lessons learned from Tipster, TREC, DLI and related efforts --- to specify and maybe even standardize on an architecture / set of components or APIs / set of protocols related to user searching --- that will enable various groups each to focus on building an agent or module that will later fit into the larger client/server search framework (with interoperability and interchange designed in).

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