Collaborative Knowledge Creation and Management in Information Retrieval

The final goal of Information Retrieval (IR) is knowledge production. However, it has been argued that knowledge production is not an individual effort but a collaborative effort. Collaboration in information retrieval is geared towards knowledge sharing and creation of new knowledge by users. This paper discusses Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR) and how it culminates to knowledge creation. It explains how created knowledge is organized and structured. It describes a functional architecture for the development of a CIR prototype called MECOCIR. Some of the features of the prototype are presented as well as how they facilitate collaborative knowledge exploitation. Knowledge creation is explained through the knowledge conversion/transformation processes proposed by Nonaka and CIR activities that facilitate these processes are highlighted and discussed.