Considering Information Providers in Social Search

The notions of collaborative information seeking (CIS) and socialsearch have extended the classical model of information seekingand retrieval. In its core, CIS and social search acknowledge theexistence of multiple users and study their implicit and explicitinteractions across various dimensions. In this paper, we argue tofurther extend the scope by introducing information providers as aseparate role to complement the process of information seekingwith information provision. We briefly describe prototype implementationsand identify a number of future research challenges.