Toward Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS)

It is natural for humans to collaborate while dealing with complex problems. In this article I consider this process of collaboration in the context of information seeking. The study and discussion presented here are driven by two dissatisfactions: (1) the majority of IR systems today do not facilitate collaboration directly, and (2) the concept of collaboration itself is not well-understood. I begin by probing the notion of collaboration and propose a model that helps us understand the requirements for a successful collaboration. A model of a Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS) environment is then rendered based on an extended model of information seeking.