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 privileges information with which that user interacts, gathers data about those interactions, and uses this meta-data to further personalize the retrieval process. This paper describes the prototype Haystack system.