Where did the researchers go?: supporting social navigation at a large academic

Abstract

Dealing with the information overload is an important challenge. Over the last decade researchers have tried to tackle that problem using social technologies. We present a social information access system that helps researchers attending a large academic conference to plan talks they wish to attend. More specifically, we have tried to address the problem of collecting reliable feedback from the community of users. Following "do it for yourself" approach, the system encourages users to add interesting talks to their individual schedules and uses scheduling information for social navigation support. We also report results of evaluation of the system at the ELearn 2007 conference.