SIGIR 2014 workshop on temporal, social and spatially-aware information access (#TAIA2014)

Spatial and temporal context are increasingly important as users rely more on mobile devices to access information on the Web. Although information access applications are becoming more context-savvy, users’ expectations are far ahead of current capabilities. For example, users expect a given application to understand the nature of their current immediate surroundings, while many systems have trouble drawing an accurate map of a city, or assigning a geographic and temporal scope to a web document. Successfully incorporating spatial and temporal context into the retrieval and user models opens up a universe of hyperlocal scenarios. Users provide an unprecedented volume of detailed, and continuously updated information about where they are, what they are doing, who they are with, and what they are thinking and feeling about their current activities. The provision of this stream creates an informal contract between the user and the information access application that the user will provide the information, but the application must provide results that are contextually relevant. Many of the research questions about how to understand and employ user context have yet to be answered. We bring together practitioners and researchers, in a program centered around short papers, keynote speakers, and discussion of recent breakthroughs and challenges in spatial and temporal information access, from algorithmic and architectural perspectives.