Social Information Retrieval Systems: Emerging Technologies and Applications for Searching the Web Effectively

The wealth of information accessible on the Internet has grown exponentially since its advent. This mass of content must be systemically sifted to glean pertinent data, and the utilization of the collective intelligence of other users, or social information retrieval, is an innovative, emerging technique. Social Information Retrieval Systems: Emerging Technologies & Applications for Searching the Web Effectively provides relevant content in the areas of information retrieval systems, services, and research; covering topics such as social tagging, collaborative querying, social network analysis, subjective relevance judgments, and collaborative filtering. Answering the increasing demand for authoritative resources on Internet technologies, this Premier Reference Source will make an indispensable addition to any library collection.

Bruce Edmonds is Director of the Centre for Policy Modelling at the Manchester Metropolitan University, and a Senior Research Fellow there. He gained his first degree in Mathematics and his Ph.D. in philosophy on Measures of complexity. His field is the intersection of sociology and computer science: both applying social mechanisms to the organisation of distributed computer science and the use of computational techniques to model aspects of society.

Cesáreo Hernández Iglesias is Professor of Business and Economics (B&E) and head of the Business and Economics Department at the University of Valladolid, Spain. He graduated from the University of Barcelona in Industrial Engineering (1970) and Economics (1974). He obtained his Ph.D. in 1975 on applications of Control Theory to Econometrics. He initially worked in time series analysis in econometric modelling as a postgraduate at the L.S.E. and Imperial College in London from 1971-74. His current research interests within the INSISOC Group (Engineering Social Systems Group) include economic methodology and social simulation.

Klaus G. Troitzsch has been a full professor of computer applications in the social sciences at the University of Koblenz-Landau since 1986. He took his PhD in political science from the University of Hamburg. From 1974 to 1978 he was a member of the Liberal Party Group in the Parliament of Hamburg. In 1979 he returned to academia as a senior researcher in an election research project. His main interests in teaching and research are social science methodology and, particularly, the simulation of social processes. He was among the founders of the Research Committee on Modelling and Simulation of the German Sociological Association (1988), of the SimSoc Consortium, which publishes the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS, now in its tenth year), and of the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA). Most of his research projects were devoted to developing simulation tools for micro, multilevel, and agent-based simulation or to implement simulation courses for social scientists, part of which have been offered in annual summer and spring courses for nearly ten years. He is author, co-author, and co-editor of a number of books and articles on simulation, and he organized several national and international conferences in social simulation.