Building Blocks For Rapid Development of Information Seeking Support Systems

This paper proposes that to help accelerate progress in our understanding of how to best develop information seeking support systems in an increasingly wide range of domains, a coordinated effort to develop, publicize, and use building blocks—tools, services, system frameworks, data sets, sample collections— would make it easier for system developers to more quickly create and evaluate new systems and allow these developers more time to focus on potentially useful novel features. An explanation of this rationale is followed by a preliminary list of potential building blocks and a discussion of the challenges associated with encouraging use and development of building blocks.