Space and Time as a Primary Classification Criterion for Information Retrieval in Distributed Social Networking

Abstract

We discuss in a compact way how the implicit relations between spatiotemporal relatedness of information items, spatiotemporal relatedness of users, social relatedness of users and semantic relatedness of information items may be exploited for an information retrieval architecture that operates along the lines of human ways of searching. The decentralized and agent oriented architecture mirrors emerging trends such as upcoming mobile and decentralized social networking as a new paradigm in social computing and is targetted to satisfy broader and more subtly interlinked information demands beyond immediate information needs which can be readily satisfied with current IR services. We briefly discuss why using spatio-temporal references as primary information criterion implicitly conserves other relations and is thus suitable for such an architecture. We finally shortly point to results from a large evaluation study using Wikipedia articles.