A proposal for an experimental platform on Collaborative Information Retrieval

Current research on Collaborative Information Retrieval area reveals a significant synergy among Information Retrieval, Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work disciplines. This fact has a high incidence in the modernization of Information Retrieval Systems. In this paper, we describe both our current research efforts to design an experimental platform for collaborative information retrieval, and our progress towards implementing it as a pluggable groupware. The platform's core has been designed as a framework, to maximize its reusability and adaptability to experiment with collaborative information retrieval techniques, with a minimal programming effort.