SBIR Phase I:Collaborative Information Retrieval from Multiple Real-Time Sources

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will assess the feasibility of creating a new kind of collaboration-enabled information retrieval application that can handle multiple sources of information, including real-time sources whose data changes frequently. The proposed application will use application-programming interface (API) adaptors to access diverse sources of information and will provide a repository where collaborators can share not only query results but also the documents referenced by those results. Research objectives will include devising a procedure whereby a collaborator can resume the browsing of a result set initiated by a different collaborator even if the result set has changed in the meantime, and designing a cryptographic protocol that allows a user to cause the direct transfer of a document from an information source to the repository, with authentication of the user to the source and to the repository, and authentication of the origin of the document to the repository. By handling multiple and diverse sources of information, the proposed application will provide effective support for joint information retrieval efforts, filling a need that has been repeatedly document by information scientists, and increasing productivity. The proposed innovation applies to both Web search and information retrieval from databases, and the potential market for the proposed application is broad.