Knowledge Creation and Enhancement through Collaborative Information Retrieval

The final goal of Information Retrieval (IR) is knowledge production. However, it has been argued that knowledge production is not an individual effort but a collaborative effort. Collaboration in information retrieval is geared towards knowledge sharing and creation of new knowledge by users. While many attempts have been made in expert systems for capturing knowledge and reusing these knowledge, we discovered that their response is based on the pattern coded in the system whereas human beings, influenced by so many factors, possess some tacit knowledge which they themselves may not be aware of until they are faced with problems that will steer up that knowledge in them. This paper aims at explaining how users' tacit knowledge can be made explicit through collaboration during IR by allowing synchronous human to human interaction in information retrieval through the mediation of a Collaborative Information Retrieval System (CIRS) and through annotation of the objects in the CIRS thus enhancing knowledge creation and structuring.