Aberdeen University researcher Paul Cleverley, on a sabbatical from Flare Consultants, has published a paper investigating information retrieval using faceted classification and word ‘co-occurrence’ based search. Cleverley quizzed some 54 petroleum engineers as to the use they made of information from in-house document management systems, the wider world wide web and industry specific resources such as the SPE’s PetroWiki. The semantic web for earth and environmental terminology (Sweet) ontology was used to guide research.
Cleverley distinguished between the information resource itself and users’ problems and queries which are distinct and only exist in ‘social reality.’ Users’ needs differ. Groups and ‘sub-cultures’ with shared beliefs will use digital libraries and enterprise search for different purposes. Little research has been done on what enterprise searchers find useful.
Cleverley proposes a new information needs model better tuned to such inherent differences. The ‘Bridges’ (broad, rich, intriguing, descriptive, general, expert and situational) information model may help meet professionals’ information needs and provide a system capability that facilitates serendipitous discovery. The Bridges model ‘has implications for faceted search in enterprise search and digital library deployments.’
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