Environmental scanning is the acquisition and use of information about events, trends, and relationships in an organization's external environment, the knowledge of which would assist management in planning the organization's future course of action. Depending on the organization's beliefs about environmental analyzability and the extent that it intrudes into the environment to understand it, f...

Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval (SCIR) is concerned with supporting two or more users who search together at the same time in order to satisfy a shared information need. SCIR systems represent a paradigmatic shift in the way we view information retrieval, moving from an individual to a group process and as such the development of novel IR techniques is needed to support this. In...

This paper proposes a new approach to support creativity through assisting the discovery of unexpected associations across di↵erent domains. This is achieved by integrating information from heterogeneous domains into a single network, enabling the interactive discovery of links across the corresponding information resources. We discuss three di↵erent pattern of domain crossing associations in t...

Objective. To design and implement an elective course in information mastery and assess its impact on students’ ability to identify information needs and formulate clinically relevant, evidence-based answers. Design. A semester-long (15-week) elective course was offered to third-year (P3) doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) students that outlined the necessary knowledge and skills for using information...

Approaches to multimedia search often evolve from existing approaches with strong average precision. However, work on search evaluation shows that average precision does not always capture effectiveness in terms of satisfying user needs because it ignores the diversity of search results. This paper investigates whether search approaches with diverse results have been neglected within the multim...

In spite of their common legal basis public sector organizations have developed a plethora of diverse forms and service descriptions for similar or even identical citizen services. As a consequence for citizens as well as for businesses it is difficult to understand the wording of forms and the procedures necessary for citizen and business services. Public administration cannot profit from syne...

Multimedia Web searching is a significant information activity for many people. Major Web search engines are critical resources in people’s efforts to locate relevant online multimedia information. It is therefore important that we understand how searchers are utilizing these Web information systems in their quest to retrieve multimedia information to design effective Web systems in support of ...

Although, most of the recent studies within the IR domain tend to target how users behave while addressing their information needs. However, even though the collection of document sets and user profiling is a top research problem, it holds inherent difficulties for the establishment of a comparative task to evaluate various approaches. Also finding a comprehensive metrics to evaluate different ...

Metaphors pervade our language because they are elastic enough to allow a speaker to express an affective viewpoint on a topic without committing to a specific meaning. This balance of expressiveness and indeterminism means that metaphors are just as useful for eliciting information as they are for conveying information. We explore here, via a demonstration of a system for metaphor interpretati...

The Information Ecology project at DSTC is constructing a Social Portal. This article explains what we mean by a Social Portal, what user needs we believe we are serving by building one, what research goals we think we are serving and how we intend to go about it.