Supporting culture-aware information search

The importance of information in our daily life is increasing rapidly. Simultaneously the availability of information from different sources has grown exponentially. The progress in data oriented context has grown from traditional approach based on queries to databases to the beneficial use of wide variety of openly available, quite often also non-structured data sources. The complexity of data needs has also increased and solutions are based on combined multi-query results. The development has also taken us towards global context, in which data is used over geographical and cultural borders. Information search is a communication oriented task, in which the cultures of users and meet the culture related aspects of data repositories. A mismatch between the users' national culture based expectations to the behavior of global information services (information system and their user interfaces) is the source of a variety of problems. In our paper we analyse the characteristics of information search and the cultural aspects guiding the behavior of the users of information systems. These two approaches are merged in the form of query-answer profiles. The purpose of the paper is to find guidelines possible to generalize and apply by the developers and users for survival in global information system context.