Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
4
Where?
In addition to knowing who is searching and what aspects of their task might benefit from collab-
oration, another important dimension of collaborative search to consider is where the participants
are located relative to other collaborators. Group members may be remote (in distinct locations) or
co-located (physically co-present). Although most collaborative search systems are designed around
exclusively remote or co-located scenarios, mixed-presence arrangements, in which a subset of the
group is co-located while others are remote, are also possible. In this chapter, we explore the issues
that different participant configurations raise for collaborative search systems, and discuss example
systems designed to support these different group arrangements.
4.1
REMOTE COLLABORATION
Often, users with shared information needs are in separate locations. For example, Martha and her
sister Beth worked together to learn more about Martha's asthma even though they were in separate
locations, and Martha and her husband George attempted to remotely identify a company to inspect
their house for mold while both were at their respective workplaces. Currently, co-searchers either
send lists of links back and forth over email, like Beth and Martha did, or use the phone or instant
messaging in order to attempt to coordinate their actions, like Martha and George did ( Morris, M.R. ,
2008 ). However, such arrangements are challenging due to limited awareness of and context about
other group members' activities. Several solutions have been proposed to enhance the experience of
remote collaboration on Web search. In this section, after providing brief overviews of these systems,
we discuss one example, SearchTogether, in more depth.
Collaborative Web browsers ( Cabri et al. , 1999 ; Gianoutsos and Grundy , 1996 ;
Greenberg and Roseman , 1996 ) are one type of system that can be used to support remote
co-searching, although they are designed for collaborative browsing and lack search-specific
features. Typically, collaborative browsers support synchronous collaboration via yoked views,
where one user's navigation causes other group members' browsers to automatically follow suit.
Often, there is a master/slave relationship among co-browsers, where only one group member's
browser causes other users to follow. For example, Cabri et al.'s group browsing system ( Cabri et al. ,
1999 ) consisted of a two-frame browser, with one frame showing the group's jointly-viewed
webpage and the other showing a history of the group's page visits, as well as chat. The
W4 browser ( Gianoutsos and Grundy , 1996 ) provided follow-me navigation and scrolling, remote
telepointers, and chat. GroupWeb ( Greenberg and Roseman , 1996 ) is another co-browsing system
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