Haystack: Per-user Information Environments

Abstract

Traditional Information Retrieval (IR) systems are designed to provide uniform access to centralized corpora by large numbers of people. The Haystack project emphasizes the relationship between a particular individual and his corpus. An individual's own haystack priviliges information with which that user interacts, gathers data about those interactions, and uses this metadata to further personalize the retrieval process. This paper describes the prototype Haystack system.