Determining personal evolving topic-needs to support information search activities

With the growing amount of information in the organizational memories of knowledge-intensive work environments, knowledge workers are suffering increasingly from information overload. Hence, an important aspect of effective knowledge delivery is supporting task-relevant knowledge by considering the characteristics of tasks and the nature of workers' search behavior in organizations. The pilot research models in the information seeking (IS) research area show that workers' information seeking activities exhibit common patterns. Based on the observations of previous studies, this work investigates the issues involved in determining the variations in task-relevant topics to support the information search process. Specifically, we provide an overview of the ISP model and theory; propose an evolving topic-needs determination method to examine the variety of a worker's information needs for topics across task-stages; and identify a worker's task-needs precisely by interactively mapping his/her information needs to the specific level of topics in the taxonomy. We have conducted an evaluation in a research institute which has implications for assisting workers who search the relevance information while conducting a long-term research project.