How Search is Going Mobile and the Implications for Information Seeking
Jonathan Raper
Professor of Geographic Information Science
Department of Information Science
City University of London
2:00-3:30 pm on Friday, April 18, 2008
Indiana University Bloomington, Herman B. Wells Library, Room LI 001
Refreshments will be available prior to the talk at 1:45 pm.
Following the talk, all interested individuals, especially students, are invited to stay for a reception and informal discussion with the speaker.
Interested graduate students are invited to join Dr. Raper for Social Nite at Irish Lion.
ABSTRACT
This lecture will start with the proposition that the act of searching for information while sitting at a desk is a special case of information seeking, and that 50 years of research on search could be marginalised by the coming of mobile information access. The aim of information seeking research should be to ‘bring the information to where the questions are’: axiomatically, the greatest proportion of questions arise when people are mobile and engaged in some activity. If this proposition is true, then information science should be focussed on situational search, as transferring current text retrieval services onto a mobile device does not produce sufficiently compelling results. This lecture will explore situational search and geographic relevance in the light of the continuing revolution in mobile device usage and explore the implications for information seeking with examples from current projects at City University, London and the new Journal of Location Based Services.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Jonathan Raper is a graduate of Cambridge University in Geography with a PhD in information systems for engineering geomorphology and is Professor of Geographic Information Science in the Department of Information Science at City University of London. He founded the Geographic Information Centre (giCentre.org) and has led a series of location based services (LBS) research projects, including: Hypergeo (Mobile tourist information systems http://www.hypergeo.org), WebPark (Virtual Guides for the outdoors http://www.webparkservices.info), LBS4all (location-based services for visually-impaired and older people http://www.lbs4all.org), and Locus (augmented reality and urban context models for mobile devices http://www.locus.org.uk). Professor Raper is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers and the Geological Society of London and a member of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. He is actively engaged in research at the intersection of these areas, having published six books and over 50 refereed articles in these fields. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Location Based Services (http://www.informaworld.com/jlbs) and a Steering Committee Member of the Location and Timing Knowledge Transfer Network. For more information about his research and publications, see: http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~raper/.
