The future of TREC FedWeb

[Djoerd Hiemstra]

Dear TREC FedWeb participants,

Thanks everyone for submitting runs to one or more of our three tasks. We had roughly the same number of participants as last year; not bad, although our goal was to grow.
Interestingly, our automatic submission system received an amazing 917 runs: A huge success! (see: http://circus.ewi.utwente.nl/fedweb/)

We discussed the future of the FedWeb track, and we decided that we will not propose a FedWeb 2015 track  as coordinators. We were unable to secure funding. Combined with the fact that we created the FedWeb collection for three years in a row (although the first time independently of TREC), we believe it is best to properly finish the TREC this year, but not to run again next year. Initially, we did plan to run the TREC FedWeb for one more year, and there are still plenty of challenges for federated and aggregated search remaining. Attached you find a proposal to discontinue the FedWeb track that might be rewritten to a proposal to continue the track, in case anyone wants to take it from here. Contact me or Ellen Voorhees in case you want to help out organizing the track.

Of course, we will properly finish this year's track, release the qrels, analyze all runs, write the TREC 2014 overview paper, and meet you in November at TREC in Gaithersburg.

Thanks again,
Best wishes,  Djoerd.