Knowledge Affordances for Hybrid Human-AI Information Seeking

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Celino, Irene
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Celino, Irene
author_facet Celino, Irene
contents As information ecosystems grow more heterogeneous, both humans and artificial agents increasingly face a simple yet unresolved question: when seeking knowledge, whom should we ask, and why? Inspired by how people intuitively "read a room", this paper introduces the concept of knowledge affordance (KA) to systematize how agents identify meaningful opportunities for information seeking in hybrid human-AI environments. Rather than introducing a fully formed framework, we propose KAs as declarative, semantically grounded descriptions of what a knowledge source can offer, for which kinds of questions, and with which contextual properties. Additionally, we suggest that KAs are relational, possibly emerging from the interplay between the agent's task, preferences and situational factors. Our contribution is thus a conceptual proposal that connects different research streams, including affordances, semantic web services, knowledge engineering and querying, and mutual intelligibility. We sketch possible research directions to build KA-aware systems that navigate information spaces with greater transparency, adaptability and shared understanding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_27539
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Knowledge Affordances for Hybrid Human-AI Information Seeking
Celino, Irene
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
As information ecosystems grow more heterogeneous, both humans and artificial agents increasingly face a simple yet unresolved question: when seeking knowledge, whom should we ask, and why? Inspired by how people intuitively "read a room", this paper introduces the concept of knowledge affordance (KA) to systematize how agents identify meaningful opportunities for information seeking in hybrid human-AI environments. Rather than introducing a fully formed framework, we propose KAs as declarative, semantically grounded descriptions of what a knowledge source can offer, for which kinds of questions, and with which contextual properties. Additionally, we suggest that KAs are relational, possibly emerging from the interplay between the agent's task, preferences and situational factors. Our contribution is thus a conceptual proposal that connects different research streams, including affordances, semantic web services, knowledge engineering and querying, and mutual intelligibility. We sketch possible research directions to build KA-aware systems that navigate information spaces with greater transparency, adaptability and shared understanding.
title Knowledge Affordances for Hybrid Human-AI Information Seeking
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27539