Personal Assistance: Helping the Users Find Their Way through the Information Space

Qualitatively enhanced access to data collections requires a more meaningful interface which endows the users with personal agents that are easily adaptable to the users’ individual retrieval preferences. Tracking individual needs of users leads to personal digital assistance that appears in the system's interaction mode as the user’s personal software agent. The main objective of personal assistance as envisaged here is enabling the system to give the users recommendations that are derived from best practice in searching for information. Best practice reflects the knowledge about how users perform successful retrieval activities and attempt to define the best ways of searching large document collections. Best practices are developed on an individual as well as on a community base. The model presented here was developed for the information system IRAIA, a portal for economic information from huge data collections of Economic Research Institutes (ERI) and National Statistical Institutions (NSI). The personal agent draws on IRAIA's model of context-oriented retrieval and observe, record and analyse the users' search and navigation by applying concepts of the respective taxonomies.