Reusable Information Quests

In support of collaboration among individuals whose work involves exploration of data networks (such as the World Wide Web, or sets of intelligence information, or more detailed databases of scientific information), some researchers are examining a problem that I will call “quest reuse”. The central idea is that a person doing such research is on a quest that has specific goals. Those goals are reflected in the search moves and value judgments made by the investigator. This chapter will research the problem of storing in compact form those moves and judgments so that later investigators may exploit them to speed and increase the effectiveness of their own research. Anyone who puts down a task, and resumes it some time later makes use of the associating powers of the brain, and of various support systems, to get the human mind back in context. The same individual, even when working with the same set of data, might have several possible contexts, and, indeed might have several contexts simultaneously latent in mind while scanning or browsing. We know that the human mind is superb at this scanning and AbstrACt