Towards a Model for Serendipitous Discoveries

A serendipitous experience in information browsing stands for an unexpected information encounter that induces some creativity or new ideas. In this paper we report our ongoing project on a model for measuring the serendipity of an information space in which users navigate by traversing hyperlinks to find desired information. For the model, we define the ‘serendipity’ value of an information space based on the summation of likelihoods that may induce a serendipitous discovery.