An Architecture to Support Multi-Touch Collaborative Information Retrieval

Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR) is the process by which people working together can collaboratively search for, share and navigate through information. Computer support for CIR currently makes use of single-user systems. CIR systems could benefit from the use of multi-user interaction to enable more than one person to collaborate using the same data sources, at the same time and in the same place. Multi-touch interaction has provided the ability for multiple users to interact simultaneously with a multi-touch surface. This paper presents a generalised architecture for multi-touch CIR applications. There are three main goals of the proposed architecture: to create hardware independence, to separate the gesture recognition and CIR information objects from the application code and to make use of an extensible gesture definition set to allow for application-specific operations. A prototype CIR tool based on this architecture is described which will be used to investigate the potential for multi-touch interaction techniques to effectively support CIR.