LAICOS: an open source platform for personalized social web search

In this paper, we introduce LAICOS, a social Web search engine as a contribution to the growing area of Social Information Retrieval (SIR). Social information and personalization are at the heart of LAICOS. On the one hand, the social context of documents is added as a layer to their textual content traditionally used for indexing to provide Personalized Social Document Representations. On the other hand, the social context of users is used for the query expansion process using the Personalized Social Query Expansion framework (PSQE) proposed in our earlier works. We describe the different components of the system while relying on social bookmarking systems as a source of social information for personalizing and enhancing the IR process. We show how the internal structure of indexes as well as the query expansion process operated using social information.