Task-based search for municipal knowledge workers : designing and implementing specialised search functionality

The municipality of Utrecht works with an overwhelming amount of information. It is important that citizens and public servants have effective tools to search for relevant information. A challenge when creating search engines is that users such as citizens have different information needs than users such as council members. This is most noticeable when users have very complex and (domain)specific needs. These require specialised functionality. A standard search engine cannot satisfy the diverse and specific information needs of all user groups at the same time. Therefore, we characterise the search tasks of different user groups and develop specialised search functionality to support those tasks. We investigate which tasks are already supported by existing systems, and which require a new kind of support. Over the course of four studies, we implemented multiple search engines and tested whether these help employees perform their tasks more effectively and efficiently. First, we developed a search engine for council information to support the tasks of council members. Second, we introduced a search engine that supports the web-based search tasks of policy workers, where our results indicated that many of their tasks are solved by getting help from the right person. Third, we supported this search behaviour by developing a search engine that helps employees get into contact with colleagues who have relevant expertise. Finally, we enhanced the original search engine for council information by automatically generating timelines of political dossiers. This let us present individual search results in their political context. The proposed solutions are domain-specific and have been evaluated at one municipality only. However, we found that user groups at other municipalities perform the same tasks, and these tasks are also found in other large organisations. Hence, we expect the specific functionality could be standardised for municipalities, and adapted to support similar tasks in other domains.

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