Christine Julien

Collaborative and Social Information Retrieval and Access: Techniques for Improved User Modeling

Professionals are continually presented with numerous information sources creating the need to determine their relevance within the huge amount of available information. Collaborative and Social Information Retrieval and Access: Techniques for Improved User Modeling presents current state-of-the-art developments including case studies, challenges, and trends. Covering topics such as recommender systems, user profiles, and collaborative filtering, this book informs and educates academicians, researchers, and field practitioners on the latest advancements in information retrieval.

Personalized information access through flexible and interoperable profiles

When searching information, any user has to face huge cognitive efforts to obtain accurate and relevant results. The search task includes a set of complementary sub-tasks in which the user needs to be necessarily involved. But, the real place of the users is not obvious without an effective knowledge of their context, environment, and so on. So we assume that a better knowledge of the user and of available information should make it possible to implement techniques aimed at adapting the retrieved information contents, as well as the search process itself. This personalization mainly relies on the definition of profiles. Since applications principally manage specific user/information profiles (structure and content), we propose in this paper a generic and a flexible profile model. This latter facilitates the construction and the interoperability of various profiles coming from different applications and/or having different structure/content. This paper presents the way the different resources (user, information...) can be modeled within the information search process and its related tasks. Then, we discuss the usefulness of profiles in such processes/tasks. Finally we present the generic and the flexible profile model we propose.

An original usage-based metrics for building a unified view of corporate documents

Nowadays, organizational members manage the huge amount of digital documents that they exploit at work. To do that, they organize documents into individual hierarchies. Actually, these documents are really parts of a companys capital as they reflect past experiences, present competences and impending expertise. Unfortunately, even if corporate documents represent high value-added material, they still mostly remain unknown from the organization as a whole. That is the reason why this paper proposes to build a unified view of corporate documents. Our approach is complementary to current content-based ones because it relies on an original metrics related to documents usage within an organization.

Organization of digital resources as an original facet for exploring the quiescent information capital of a community

Knowledge workers organize the documents they need for daily task achievement in their personal information spaces (PISs). For a community, people’s PISs constitute in-house value-added resources. Paradoxically, this information source is poorly exploited, as people tend to use external sources (e.g., the Web), although this is probably poorly appropriate in corporate context. This article tackles such information access issues in the common context. Our contribution consists in a faceted visual interface to explore various facets (points of view) of the information of a community, which remains quiescent otherwise. Besides common facets only based on information contents, we propose a new facet relying on the way users in a community manage and organize information. As a result, our approach exploits knowledge workers’ efforts devoted to PIS management, turning them to profit for all, by fostering mutual benefit between stakeholders. The proposed facet relies on an original organization-based similarity measure that we define and experiment.

Usagers et recherche d'information: Modélisation des usagers pour la recherche d'information adaptative

User profiles are the main component of adaptive information retrieval systems. We are identifying in this paper main limits of the usage of user profiles. We are discussing about these limits in underlying some solutions and taking into account two points of view: the application point of view and the user point of view.

Activités documentaires des usagers au sein de l'organisation : amélioration par la pratique d'annotation collective

This paper deals with document-related activities that knowledge workers use to manage within their organization. They have to master various applications, each one being specific to a given document-related activity. This current situation implies a high cognitive load for the user. Regarding the organizational level, although relevant information was costly to find, it is poorly shared thus constituting a dormant capital. A multi-user architecture along with suited processes is presented. Our proposal intends to federate and improve document- related activities based on a win-win principle, fostering the improvement of an activity thanks to the other ones. This proposal makes extensive use of peoples personal annotation spaces so as to capitalize on any information entering the organization.