Such situations are typically complex in nature, and involve working through several sessions exploring, evaluating, and gathering relevant information.
On the theory side, Shah has presented C5 Model[2][3] for studying collaborative situations, including information seeking.
On the practical side, a few specialized systems for supporting CIS have emerged in the recent past, but their usage and evaluations have underwhelmed.
[4] Shah's book[5] provides a comprehensive review of this field, including theories, models, systems, evaluation, and future research directions.
While there is still a lack of a definition or a terminology that is universally accepted, but most agree that CIS is an active process, as opposed to collaborative filtering, where a system connects the users based on their passive involvement (e.g., buying similar products on Amazon).
Foley and Smeaton[23] defined two key aspects of collaborative information seeking as division of labor and the sharing of knowledge.
The sharing of knowledge allows searchers to influence each other's activities as they interact with the retrieval system in pursuit of their (often evolving) information need.
For instance, Morris,[25] using a survey with 204 knowledge workers at a large technology company found that people often like and want to collaborate, but they do not find specialized tools to help them in such endeavors.
Some of the situations for doing collaborative information seeking in this survey were travel planning, shopping, and literature search.
In general, the choice of the method or tool for our respondents depended on their situation (co-located or remote), and objective (brainstorming or working on independent parts).
[27] Recently Hansen & Jarvelin[28] and Golovchinsky, Pickens, & Back[29] also classified approaches to collaborative IR using these two dimensions of space and time.
These mechanisms are tightly coupled with the kind of control the system can support in a collaborative environment (discussed later).
Three components specific to group-work or collaboration that are highly predominant in the CIS or CSCW literature are control, communication, and awareness.
For instance, Donath & Robertson[34] presented a system that allows a user to know that others were currently viewing the same webpage and communicate with those people to initiate a possible collaboration or at least a co-browsing experience.
They found that one needs to provide "right" (not too little, not too much, and appropriate for the task at hand) kind of awareness to reduce the cost of coordination and maximize the benefits of collaboration.
Building on top of this command-line interface, Ariadne could capture the users’ input and the database’s output, and form them into a search history that consisted of a series of command-output pairs.
This visualization of the search process in Ariadne makes it possible to annotate, discuss with colleagues around the screen, and distribute to remote collaborators for asynchronous commenting easily and effectively.
More recently, one of the collaborative information seeking tools that have caught a lot of attention is SearchTogether, developed by Morris and Horvitz.
Finally, the persistence feature in SearchTogether is instantiated by storing all the objects and actions, including IM conversations, query histories, recommendation queues, and page-specific metadata.
This rank fusion is just one way in which a search system that manages activities of multiple collaborating searchers can combine their inputs to generate results that are better than those produced by individuals working independently.
This combination of roles allowed searchers to explore and exploit the information space, and led teams to discover more unique relevant documents than pairs of individuals working separately.
Coagmento has been developed with a client-server architecture, where the client is implemented as a Firefox plug-in that helps multiple people working in collaboration to communicate, and search, share and organize information.
Due to this decoupling, Coagmento provides a flexible architecture that allows its users to be co-located or remote, working synchronously or asynchronously, and use different platforms.
The toolbar has three major parts: The sidebar features a chat window, under which there are three tabs with the history of search engine queries, saved pages and snippets.
The implementation of Cosme was based on CIRLab (Collaborative Information Retrieval Laboratory) instantiation, a groupware framework for CIS research and experimentation, Java as programming language, NetBeans IDE Platform as plug-in base, and Amenities (A MEthodology for aNalysis and desIgn of cooperaTIve systEmS) as software engineering methodology.
Fortunately, some CIS application frameworks and toolkits are increasing their popularity since they have a high reusability impact for both developers and researchers, like Coagmento Collaboratory and DrakkarKeel.