Beyond the Web: Retrieval in Social Information Spaces

We research whether the inclusion of information about an information user’s social environment and his position in the social network of his peers leads to an improval in search effectiveness. Traditional information retrieval methods fail to address the fact that information production and consumption are social activities. We ameliorate this problem by extending the domain model of information retrieval to include social networks. We describe a technique for information retrieval in such an enviroment and evaluate it in comparison to vector space retrieval.