A grounded and participatory approach to collaborative information exploration and management

Classification of concepts and terms is an effective way of organising information for managing large information sources. In many cases, the classification schemes are devised through a painstakingly time-consuming process without user participation, and impose standardised terms as a result. However, in the context of group work in which individuals with diverse views and background work together, such an overhead and the inflexibility of term usage can undermine efficient information management and user satisfaction. Instead, a bottom-up approach can be combined in which users participate and construct such classification schemes as they explore the information space. The information organisation can hence be customised to the specific group needs and term usages are grounded in the information containers themselves allowing users to interpret the meaning of terms in context. We describe a system that constructs concept indexes, which supports such a bottom-up process of information exploration and management.