Community as a New Communication Layerin the Internet
Hideaki Takeda
National Institute of Informatics
2-1-2, Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430 Japane-mail: takeda@nii.ac.jp

1. Introduction
The amount of information on the Internet has been increasing
with the accelerating speed. The problem we are facing is how toensure the quality of information within the enormous amount ofinformation. Information exchanging among people is one of
powerful and practical ways to solve information flood because
we can act intelligent agents for each other to collect, filter andassociate necessary information. The power stems from personal
human network. If we need variable information to exchange, wemust have a good human network. Personal human network isuseful for various utilization of information like information
gathering. Personal human network thus has a great potential that
can take us out of information flood. We are conducting a series ofresearch to support and utilized activities to form personal humannetwork and communities from the viewpoint of information
technology, in particular artificial intelligence.

2. Roles of communities in CMC
Personal human networks and communities exist everywhere in
our real life. It is so natural that we can seldom be aware of theirexistence explicitly. When shifting our communication directly
among people to computer-mediated communication, theirimportance should be phrased explicitly.
In this paper, we regard personal human networks as the basic
information and communities as structures upon personal humannetworks.
From the viewpoint of computer-mediated communication, we canenumerate some roles of communities. The first is that
communities provide channels for information exchange on
specific topics. An typical example is a Mailing List. Becoming amember of a community is obtaining a channel to send and receive
information related on the community. The second is that they canwork as filtering information. Members of communities collectand distribute information specific to some topics either explicitly
or implicitly. Once a consensus can be formed in a community,
information specific to the topics can be easily collected or
selected by members of the community. The third is that
communities can offer a field for collaboration to produce new
information. Discussions in communities can yield new
information.
These roles are essential to realize better communication on theInternet, but online communities or communities on the Internetare still by far un-mature in comparison with real-worldcommunities. We need more technologies both to make online
communities more natural like real-world ones, and to leveragefeatures of online communities rather than real-world ones.
We show three research results to support community activities inthis paper. We can model it in the following way:
1. Forming communities(1) How to know relationship among people?
(2) How to form communities from relationship amongpeople?
2. Facilitating activities in communities(1) How to make communities more natural?
(2) How to utilize information in communities?
The first research concerned 1(1), the second 1(2), and the third2(1).

3. Finding relationship among WWW bookmarks
The first work is to find human relationship through WWW
bookmarks[1][2]. WWW bookmarks are results of implicit orexplicit efforts to represent personal views for the Internet.
Regarding WWW bookmarks as personal concept systems, we canfind relationship among them with the similar method to theprevious work. We call it shared topics network because concepts
represent some topics which the user are interested in and they areshared among users by the relationship generated by this method.
Figure 1 is an example of the generated shared topics networkwith three users. We can find some common relationship like(search,IR)and(academia,research-related),
andcommunity-dependent relationship like (Unix, academia).
The evaluation as recommender systems is good enough. Topics
found by the system were apparently more acceptable than pages
themselves.

Fig 1: Mapping among WWW bookmarks

Figure 2: Neighborhood Matchmaker Method

4. Re-configuration of Personal Human Networks
Personal human network is useful for various utilization ofinformation like information gathering, but it is usually formed
locally and often independently. In order to adapt various needs forinformation utilization, it is necessary to extend and optimize it.
We propose Neighborhood Matchmaker Method as are-configuration method for personal human a network[3][4]. It
can optimize networks distributedly from the arbitrarily given
networks.
Extending or optimizing human network is not easy even in thereal world. We should meet new persons then select some of themas friends.
How can we solve this problem in our daily life? The practicalway is introduction of new friends by the current friends. It isrealistic and efficient because the person who knows both canjudge whether this combination is suitable or not. Friends work as
matchmaker for new friends. We formalize this ”friends asmatchmaker” as an algorithm to extend and optimize networks(see Figure 2).
The key feature of this approach is no need for central servers. The
benefits of this approach are threefold. The first is to keep spreadof information minimally. Information on a person is transferred toonly persons connected to her/him directly. It is desirable to keep
personal information secure. The second is distributedcomputation. Computation to figure out better relationship is doneby each mode, i.e., computers used by participants work for it. It isappropriate for a personal human network because we do not haveto care the size of network. The third is gradual computation. The
network will be converged gradually so that we can obtain theoptimal network to some extent even if we stop the computation
anytime.

presence, physical communicative cues, interpersonal spaces, andcooperative reference. Participants can easily identify otherparticipants with avatar-like agents. And people can understandmeanings of other participants’ messages well and become
expressive in their messages with non-verbal behaviours of agents.
We performed a preliminary psychological experiment to clarify
functions of avatar-like agents, and implemented the result inTelMeA. We also evaluated TelMeA by a test use and showed that
TelMeA is natural and useful for asynchronous communities.

6. Concluding remarks
In this paper, we show our motivation and attempt to support andutilize online communities. We do not aim just to make online
community close to real-world communities, although naturalness
to human users is mandatory. Online communities have newfeatures that real-world communities do not have, i.e., free fromspatial and time constraints, capability of larger and deeper
communities, re-use of records, seamless connection withcomputing like agents and so on. Our purpose is to pursue
possibilities of such features of online communities to realize newand better community activities.

5. Expressive Media for Online Communities
We proposed an asynchronous community system named
TelMeA[5][6], which employs avatar-like agents, or scriptableanimated agents, as the conversation interface. Few of current
online community systems are close to real communities both inreality and in functions. We show with the proposed system thatonline community can be more like our real community inawareness of participants and of community itself.
TelMeA realizes the following functions for asynchronous
communication using avatar-like agents: individual embodied

Figure 3:

TelMeA: Asynchronous Community System with
Avatar-like AgentsReferences[1] Hideaki Takeda, Takeshi Matsuzuka, and Yuichiro Taniguchi.
Discovery of shared topics networks among people --- a simple
approach to find community knowledge from www bookmarks ---.
In Proceedings of the Pacific Rim International Conference ofArtificial Intelligence (PRICAI 00), Lecture Notes in Artificial
Intelligence, No. 1886, pages 668–678, 2000.
[2] Masahiro HAMASAKI, Hideaki TAKEDA, Experimental
Results for a method to discover of human relationship based on
WWW bookmarks Fifth International Conference on
Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information Engineering Systems &Allied Technologies (KES-2001), 2001.
[3] Masahiro Hamasaki and Hideaki Takeda. Find better friends?
-- re-configuration of personal networks by the neighborhoodmatchmaker method --. In Proceedings of the International
Workshop on Semantic Web Foundations and Application
Technologies (SWFAT), pages 73–76, 2003.
[4] Masahiro Hamasaki and Hideaki Takeda. Proposal of theextension network model for personal human network by usingneighborhood matchmaker. Technical Report NII-2002-005E,
National Institute of Informatics, October 2002.
[5] Toru Takahashi and Hideaki Takeda. Proposal of a script
language for embodied conversational agents as asynchronous
conversational media. In Proceedings of The First International
Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems(AAMAS 2002), pages 1387–1388, July 2002.
[6] Toru Takahashi and Hideaki Takeda. TelMeA: An
asynchronous community system with avatar-like agents. In
Human Computer Interaction INTERACT '01, pages 190–197,Tokyo, July 2001.