Asynchronous social search as a single point of access to information

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present asynchronous social search as a novel and intuitive approach to search for information in which people collaborate to find the information they are looking for. Design/methodology/approach A prototype was built to test the feasibility in a business environment. A case study was performed at an organisation with over 1,000 employees to evaluate the quality of asynchronous social search as a single point of access to information. Findings Based on the results, the authors conclude that asynchronous social search has great potential as a single point of access to organisational information. Key strengths include that the implementation requires no integration with the existing information technology infrastructure of organisations and participants were very satisfied with the results provided by the prototype. Originality/value This work demonstrates that asynchronous social search indeed provides a very good starting point for a single point of access to information, as integration with existing software systems is not necessary, and due to the lightweightness of the approach it also performs really well which, in turn, stimulates the technology’s acceptance by its end-users.

[1]  Marco R. Spruit,et al.  DWCMM: The Data Warehouse Capability Maturity Model , 2015, J. Univers. Comput. Sci..

[2]  Christoph Meinel,et al.  Web Search Personalization Via Social Bookmarking and Tagging , 2007, ISWC/ASWC.

[3]  Ed H. Chi,et al.  An elaborated model of social search , 2010, Inf. Process. Manag..

[4]  Filip Radlinski,et al.  Personalizing web search using long term browsing history , 2011, WSDM '11.

[5]  Richard T. Watson,et al.  A strategic perspective of electronic democracy , 2001, CACM.

[6]  Eric Horvitz,et al.  SearchTogether: an interface for collaborative web search , 2007, UIST.

[7]  R. Yin.  Case Study Research: Design and Methods , 1984 .

[8]  Fred D. Davis.  Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology , 1989, MIS Q..

[9]  Anne Helmond,et al.  The like economy: Social buttons and the data-intensive web , 2013, New Media Soc..

[10]  Gordon B. Davis,et al.  User Acceptance of Information Technology: Toward a Unified View , 2003, MIS Q..

[11]  Joseph M. Hellerstein,et al.  Ground: A Data Context Service , 2017, CIDR.

[12]  Fred D. Davis,et al.  A Theoretical Extension of the Technology Acceptance Model: Four Longitudinal Field Studies , 2000, Management Science.

[13]  Georgia Koutrika,et al.  Can social bookmarking improve web search? , 2008, WSDM '08.

[14]  Marco Spruit,et al.  Software as a Service and the Pricing Strategy for Vendors , 2011 .

[15]  Sudeh Cheraghi-Sohi,et al.  A qualitative study of patient and professional perspectives of healthcare services for multiple sclerosis: implications for service development and policy , 2017, Health & social care in the community.

[16]  Marco R. Spruit,et al.  Determining the Relative Importance of Webpages Based on Social Signals Using the Social Score and the Potential Role of the Social Score in an Asynchronous Social Search Engine , 2014, IC3K.

[17]  Peter Pirolli,et al.  Do your friends make you smarter?: An analysis of social strategies in online information seeking , 2010, Inf. Process. Manag..

[18]  Bernardo A. Huberman,et al.  Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems , 2006, J. Inf. Sci..

[19]  Lisa M. Lix,et al.  Health Services Data: Managing the Data Warehouse: 25 Years of Experience at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy , 2015 .

[20]  Damon Horowitz,et al.  The anatomy of a large-scale social search engine , 2010, WWW '10.

[21]  Marco R. Spruit,et al.  Power to the People! - Meta-Algorithmic Modelling in Applied Data Science , 2016, KDIR.

[22]  Ryen W. White,et al.  Mining the search trails of surfing crowds: identifying relevant websites from user activity , 2008, WWW.

[23]  Erik M. van Raaij,et al.  The acceptance and use of a virtual learning environment in China , 2008, Comput. Educ..

[24]  Frank Siqueira,et al.  Dédalo: A middleware with a single point of access for heterogeneous distributed computing environments , 2016, 2016 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communication (ISCC).

[25]  Andrei Broder,et al.  A taxonomy of web search , 2002, SIGF.

[26]  Jianchang Mao,et al.  Enterprise Search: Tough Stuff , 2004, ACM Queue.

[27]  Satoshi Nakamura,et al.  Can social bookmarking enhance search in the web? , 2007, JCDL '07.

[28]  Steve Offsey,et al.  Knowledge Management: Linking People to Knowledge for Bottom Line Results , 1997, J. Knowl. Manag..

[29]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  Collaborative search revisited , 2013, CSCW.

[30]  Richard P. Bagozzi,et al.  The Legacy of the Technology Acceptance Model and a Proposal for a Paradigm Shift , 2007, J. Assoc. Inf. Syst..

[31]  Marco R. Spruit,et al.  Webstrategy Formulation: Benefiting from Web 2.0 Concepts to Deliver Business Values , 2008, WSKS.

[32]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  SearchBuddies: Bringing Search Engines into the Conversation , 2012, ICWSM.

[33]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  A survey of collaborative web search practices , 2008, CHI.

[34]  Inge van de Weerd,et al.  Understanding users' behavior with software operation data mining , 2014, Comput. Hum. Behav..