Supporting collaborative information activities in networked communities

Over the years, computer scientists have primarily studied the information discovery process as a single user activity. For example, the research field of information retrieval has provided us with sophisticated techniques for supporting the search process, but mostly in the context of a single, isolated user’s interaction with an information base. The recent surge of interest in Knowledge Management, however, has contributed to enlarging the view on processes involving information discovery, sharing and reuse. Recent research now focuses as well on their cooperative aspects and methods for supporting these.