The second edition of ECol (Evaluation on Collaborative Information Seeking and Retrieval) will be held in Oslo, on March 11 2017.

The ECol workshop mainly addresses challenges related to collaborative information retrieval (CIR) or seeking (CIS) which refer to methodologies and technologies that support collective-knowledge sharing within a work team in order to solve a shared complex problem. Collaborative search is also known as a social process in which users leverage from other users’ interactions and social signals (e.g., bookmarks and annotations).

While a follow on from our previous workshop, this workshop has two distinguishing and novel elements: (i) it will have a specific focus on social IR and collaborative IR evaluation, bridging the gap within this space, and (ii) it will provide datasets, tools, and new tasks for participants and others to undertake evaluations and explore this space. Authors have the opportunity to:

• Use their own datasets/tools to propose an evaluation framework for the identified tasks.
• Use the provided datasets/tools to propose an evaluation framework for a task they have identified.
• Propose an evaluation framework without support of datasets/tools for a task we/they have identified.
• Designing possible tasks (with/without proposing models and evaluation frameworks) on provided or their own datasets.

Thus, ECol'17 will be an interactive full day workshop that will provide an opportunity for academic and industrial researchers working on CIS, CIR and/or social search to discuss the main challenges underlying these lines of research.