Many researchers have pointed to tasks as being the driving force for Information Seeking and Retrieval (ISR). Unfortunately, researchers do not agree on what is meant by tasks and related concepts such as activities and search tasks. Researchers often use different terminologies to describe the same concepts or use the same terms to refer to different concepts. Moreover, previous researchers ignored work roles and their effect on tasks. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to present some of the main competing task hierarchies by conducting a literature analysis in the field of ISR, management, work structure, and human resources. A specific contribution is to use key existing (explicit or implicit) hierarchies and frameworks of tasks into an integrated taxonomy of tasks and related concepts for use by researchers in ISR.
Exploratory search is an intuitive concept in interactive information retrieval. It is known that searchers use exploratory search strategies when learning and investigating a new domain. Many definitions for Exploratory Search have been proposed. However, the main dimensions involve high uncertainty with respect to the problem context, the user expertise, and the search process. In this work, we study exploratory search in the literature, and we provide a conceptual model of exploratory search. We also conduct a user study to examine how literature searches are exploratory and what factors influence the exploratory dimensions and characteristics. Moreover, we review the exploratory support tasks, and we try to better design and evaluate exploratory user interfaces.
CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Search interfaces.
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