An asynchronous collaborative search system for online video search

Abstract

This version is available at https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/52294/ Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde. Unless otherwise explicitly stated on the manuscript, Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Please check the manuscript for details of any other licences that may have been applied. You may not engage in further distribution of the material for any profitmaking activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute both the url (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/) and the content of this paper for research or private study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge.Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to the AbstractThere are a number of multimedia tasks and environments that can be collaborative in nature and involve contributions from more than one individual. Examples of such tasks include organising photographs or videos from multiple people from a large event, students working together to complete a class project, or artists and/or animators working on a production. Despite this, current state of the art applications that have been created to assist in multimedia search and organisation focus on a single user searching alone and do not take into consideration the collaborative nature of a large number of multimedia tasks. The limited work in collaborative search for multimedia applications has concentrated mostly on synchronous, and quite often co-located, collaboration between persons. However, these collaborative scenarios are not always practical or feasible. In order to overcome these shortcomings we have created an innovative system for online video search, which provides mechanisms for groups of users to collaborate both asynchronously and remotely on video search tasks. In order to evaluate our system a user evaluation was conducted. This evaluation simulated multiple conditions and scenarios for collaboration, varying on awareness, division of labour, sense making and persistence. The outcome of this evaluation demonstrates the benefit and usability of our system for asynchronous and remote collaboration between users. In addition the results of this evaluation provide a comparison between implicit and explicit collaboration in the same search system.

How Can We Better Support Users with Non-Uniform Information Access in Collaborative Information Retrieval?

“…This is mainly because team members do not have an efficient way to obtain awareness, communicate and divide labour for the search task. Also, it is often essential for team members to be able to retain discovered content for later use [21]; this is referred to as "persistence of data" [12,22,23]. As such, a great deal of research has been conducted in CIR in order to enhance communication and collaboration capabilities of users [2,8,11,12,22,23].…”

“…However, previous research has argued that CIR systems must provide more than just communication [11,22]. Example systems for UI-level mediation include SearchTogether [22], CoSearch [2], Coagmento [11], WeSearch [23], ViGOR [12] and Físchlár-DiamondTouch [27]. SearchTogether [22] allows asynchronous collaboration for web search by enabling storage of all objects and actions performed at the end of a search session.…”

“…webpages, there has also been research conducted into multimedia CIR. For example, Halvey et al [12] developed a collaborative video retrieval system called ViGOR, which allows asynchronous and distributed collaboration. Smeaton et al [27] developed a synchronous and co-located video retrieval system for a multiuser, touch sensitive tabletops named Físchlár.…”

“…Besides, a fundamental difference in assumption between CIR and MLCIR means that not every CIR component and concept may be directly applicable to MLCIR, e.g. most components in CIR systems [12,22] may allow users to share search results within their team without restrictions, which for MLCIR systems should be modified. To the best of our knowledge, no user evaluations have been conducted to examine the impact of MLCIR and to provide user-centred design recommendations for future development of MLCIR systems.…”

“…This is known as Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR). A great deal of research in CIR [2,11,12,22,23] has utilised concepts like awareness, division of labour and persistence to enhance the collaboration experience and outcomes for users. However, much of this research has assumed that all members of a collaborative search team have equal access to the underlying information, and that they can share any information with each other without restriction, e.g.…”