Social Navigation: An Extended Definition

Abstract

When navigating through an information space, one often needs, and makes use of, the advice of other agents in that space, human as well as non-human. This phenomenon has in previous publications been called Social Navigation [Cha94, Die97, Sve98] and two forms of this concept have been defined: direct and indirect social navigation. This paper looks at other aspects of social navigation, such as the agents intention when communicating navigational information and the identification of the navigating and communicating agents (human and non-human) towards each other. These distinctions are intended for use when identifying differences between different social naviga- tional activities.