When? - Collaborative Web Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why - page 55

The CoSense system ( Paul and Morris , 2009 ) expanded even further upon SearchTogether's
awareness features; in the next section, we explore in detail the awareness features CoSense provides
to support synchronous collaborative search and how its features are used differently in synchronous
and asynchronous scenarios.

5.2.1 EXAMPLE: COSENSE
CoSense ( Paul and Morris , 2009 ) is an extension to the SearchTogether system that provides en-
hanced awareness of collaborators' activities in order to facilitate sensemaking, both of the products
of a collaborative search and of the collaborative search process itself. CoSense offers four different
views of the data from a shared search session: a search strategies view, a timeline view, a chat-centric
view, and a workspace view.
The search strategies view, shown in Figure 5.4, provides information about the roles and skills
of group members, such as the query terms used, domains visited, amount of activity from each group
member, and use of advanced techniques such as special search operators or diverse search engines.
The timeline view, shown in Figure 5.5, provides an integrated chronological representation of all the
actions of all group members during the search session. The chat-centric view, shown in Figure 5.6,
contextualizes instant messaging conversations by enabling users to view the page that was open
in a collaborator's browser at the time they sent a particular chat message. Finally, the workspace
view, shown in Figure 5.7, allows group members to organize the products of their search, maintain
notes about task strategy, and link their search findings to external, non-Web documents (such as
spreadsheets or text files).
An evaluation of CoSense illustrated how different types of awareness features were valuable
for different temporal phases of collaboration. In particular, the evaluation found that group members
working together synchronously needed support in making sense of how information was being
found (i.e., the search process) and thus, more frequently, made use of the search strategies and
chat-centric views to understand what other group members were currently working on. In contrast,
users collaborating asynchronously needed support in making sense of what had been found (i.e.,
the search products) and, therefore, more heavily used the timeline and workspace views to explore
the webpages that had been discovered.

5.3 WHEN: CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Researchers have recognized that synchronous and asynchronous collaboration patterns merit con-
sideration when designing collaborative search systems. As we have seen, they have introduced both
interface and algorithmic features to support these different temporal work styles. More in-depth
evaluations of these systems, in order to better understand how different temporality in collabora-
tions impacts system use, is an important area of future work. The CoSense evaluation summarized
in the previous section is an initial step in this direction. Additionally, understanding the when of
collaborative search at a more fine-grained level is another open issue, such as understanding the