The general goal of the workshop will be to coalesce a research agenda that stimulates progress toward better systems that support information seeking. More specifically, the workshop will aim to identify the most promising research directions for three aspects of information seeking: theory, development, and evaluation. Thus, the key workshop objectives are:

• Identify and organize the most promising models of information seeking;
• Identify the key existing technologies that can be adapted to support information seeking activities;
• Specify and organize the new kinds of technologies that are required to support information seeking activities;
• Identify methods and associated metrics for evaluating information seeking processes

Meeting the needs of people who seek information to discover and learn is a grand challenge, and the tools and services needed to meet this challenge will be fundamental to the emerging cyberinfrastructure. The time and conditions are right to develop the theory, techniques, and tools to support such information seeking needs. With this two-day workshop we aim to bring together thought leaders in information retrieval, library and information science, and human-computer interaction to shape the short- and long-term agenda for research in systems to support information seeking. In particular the workshop will address the following three themes:

1. Understanding / modeling exploratory search behavior
   • Individual user models (client side and server side)
   • Group and community models
   • Human information behavior (tactics, strategies, mental models)
   • Goals, tasks, and actions
   • Domain and data type factors
   
   
2. Providing system support for exploratory search
   • Interfaces and visualizations
   • Interaction models and paradigms
   • Support for collaboration
   • Alternative search media (mobile, ubiquitous search)
   • Organizational structures (indexes, facets, ontologies)
   • Alternative sources of evidence (biometrics, context sensitivity)
   • Tool suites and integration of IS3 support with existing products (office suites)
   
   
3. Evaluating systems to support exploratory search
   • Metrics for evaluating IS3 performance (e.g., learning rate, decision-making quality)
   • Evaluation methodologies and strategies (e.g., task-oriented, ethnographic)
   • Non-interactive evaluation of IS3 (e.g., log analyses, test collections, simulations)
   • Tasks and task taxonomies for IS3 evaluation