IADIS International Conference on Web Based Communities 2006

ACTION-ORIENTED WEBLOG TO SUPPORT ACADEMIC
CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
Kosuke Numa
The Graduate University for Advanced Studies
2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 101-8430 Japannuma@grad.nii.ac.jp

Toshiyuki Hirata
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Ikki Ohmukai, Ryutaro Ichise, Hideaki Takeda
National Institute of Informatics

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we propose a system called ActionLog which supports authoring and sharing Weblog contents for the
purposes of reviewing support and communication support on Academic Conferences. ActionLog collects users' actions
from other information systems placed at a conference site, and automatically generates drafts of Weblog contents basedon the action contexts. Users can edit and publish entries according to their will. We implemented and applied the system
on an actual academic conference as a field test. The result shows that the system was used both for reviewing theiractivities and for communicating other participants.
KEYWORDS
Academic Conference Support, Weblog, Action Records, Reviewing Support, Communication Support

1. INTRODUCTION
Finding people with similar interests is an important activity in event spaces such as academic conferences.
Presenting information related to participants is helpful for this purpose. However, because of limitation oftime and effort, it is almost impossible to look through all information. It is also difficult to write and publish
own information for sharing them with other participants. Through this research, we intend to assist
participants to review their activities at conference site and to enhance communication among participants.
Our approach to enhance communication is to share experiences, i.e., users' actions/interactions with theirsurroundings that include information systems and other people. Sharing experiences enhances greater
understanding of people and objects. Before sharing others' experiences, however, we must understand ourown experiences. For that reason, communication support based on shared experiences should include
support for reviewing of individuals' experiences.
Personal experiences consist not only of the objective observed histories from sensors/systems but also
their related thoughts and impressions. Therefore we include the subjective authoring process to proceduresof sharing personal experiences.
This paper presents an action-oriented Weblog generation and aggregation method to activate
communities. The next section describes our strategy to examine actions for community support specificallyand proposes an action-oriented Weblog system, and we apply its application for an academic conference insection 3. Field-test results are shown in section 4 and features of our method are discussed in comparison
with related works in section 5. Section 6 concludes our paper.

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2. ACTIONLOG CONFERENCE
2.1 Basic Idea
Weblog has been widely spread all over the world. Many people use Weblog as a record of their daily life,
much like a personal dairy. Our system supports such authoring by adding context.
We model users' behaviors as actions with real world contexts. Action means what they do and the realworld context is a set of information for the environment in which they do so. The real world context
includes some physical situations like time and place, subjective situations like intentional objects, and social
situations like people nearby.
The system manages to capture actions and contexts by using sensors and cooperating with other systems.
Some contexts, like time and place can be obtained directly from sensors, but others should be inferred fromsensor information. For example, we can obtain nearby people by integrating locational information ofmultiple users.
Then the system generates an entry for each action with sentences indicating the context of the action as adraft. Furthermore, the system shows related information, e.g., entries by other people with the same orsimilar contexts. This is achieved by integrating and calculating contexts.
We call this system concept as ActionLog, and we implemented and applied it to support academic
conferences. We call this version of the system as ActionLog Conference later on.

2.2 Sharing Users’ Opinions: Action-oriented Approach
The purpose of ActionLog Conference is not only to support participants in composing their record ofexperiences but also to share experiences among participants. Sharing opinions or impressions among
participants for an event serves an important role in characterizing the event and in communicating about itwith other participants. We propose a way to share participants' experiences using ActionLog Conference toachieve casual sharing of opinions among participants.
To involve user's subjective thoughts to the contents, personal experience should be described by the user.
For example, we cannot tell what Mr. A is doing when we find the situation where he is in a restaurant,
eating some food, and talking about something with Ms. B. Mr. A might say he was having dinner, having animportant discussion, or just socializing with Ms. B. Therefore, we employ Weblogs as an infrastructure forcontents sharing. People can easily express their thoughts or opinions with Weblog. In addition, Weblog
offers an infrastructural aid to manage and share machine-readable contents (Karger 2004).
The generated and published contents are aggregated according to their context. For example, extracting
and listing the contents about a certain presentation achieves a topic-centric view (Avesani 2005) on thepresentation.
In this research, we assume an experience consists of an objectively observed action and her/his
subjective thought at that time. To achieve experience sharing using information systems, we propose amethod to capture user's actions, to generate contents from these actions, and sharing the contents among
participants. Based on this method, the system helps the user to communicate with other participants.

2.3 Criteria to Design Communication
To design communication by sharing action-based contents, the following points should be considered.
What kinds of actions are shared? We especially address event participants' interactions with information
systems because they seem to be active and spontaneous actions for the system user. These interactions are
efficiently collectable by the system and are easily understandable for participants.
When actions are shared? Meeting the other participants is one of the most important activities in an
event space. Action-based contents should be ready for sharing immediately after the actions occurred tosupport participants in finding participants with identical or similar interests. Previous works for sharing
experiential contents do not process the experience in real time. PEPYS (Newman 1991) and ComicDiary(Sumi 2002) are also automatic content generation systems, but they generate diary-style contents
day-by-day.

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How actions are shared? It is important to reduce users' costs of capturing actions, creating contents, andsharing contents. Wearable computers can record all things the user sees and hears (Gemmell 2002). Videoand audio recordings help users to review their actions and share those experiences; nevertheless, using suchlarge-scale equipment engenders high costs and is difficult to casually achieve. Sharing videos is also a
difficult task for watchers of the contents. Text-based and/or other easily understandable expressions ofexperiences are needed.
With whom actions are shared? Sharing actions engenders privacy problems. There are some solutions
for location-based systems, such as an anonymizing approach (Gruteser 2003) or an obfuscation approach(Duckham 2005). However, in event spaces where participants wish to meet people, disclosure of thelocation and/or actions does not matter. It is sufficient for the user to select to publish or hide each action
using a one-click operation.

3. IMPLEMENTATIONS
3.1 Overall
We implement ActionLog system for an academic conference called JSAI2005. In the conference, we
provide several support services and ActionLog is also provided as a conference service. ActionLog collects
participants' use of the other systems provided at the conference site and represents these use records
integratively.
Figure 1 depicts the architecture of the ActionLog system. The left-hand side of the figure indicates theaction collection part of ActionLog. The system captures the user's action from the other information systems
placed at conference sites and on the Web. The center part indicates the content generation part. In this part,the system generates the Weblog content associated with the action based on the captured context
information of the action. The user's action records are generated automatically through interactions withother systems and other people in the event space and on the Web. In the right-hand side of the figure, theuser interacts with the system as Weblog system. The user authorizes the generated contents. They are
published on the Weblog and are shared among participants. Exchanging contents among users can enhancecommunication. Aggregating the contents based on their context facilitates context-based access to thecontents; responding to others' contents engenders topic-based discussion.

Figure 1. System architecture of the ActionLog system

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3.2 Designing Users’ Actions
ActionLog collects the users’ activities and the users’ information from the following services/systems,
which were provided as conference services at JSAI2005:- Web-based systems (Polyphonet Conference)• Researchers’ social network system (Matsuo 2003)• Scheduling support system (Hamasaki 2004)- Onsite systems• Name cards with RFID tags
• Session participation management terminals• Presentation management terminals• Kiosk terminals using RFID card for user authentication
Figure 2 shows the installation of a session participation management terminal and an RFID card.

Figure 2. Participation management terminal and RFID card

The types of action captured by the ActionLog system and the users’ information sent from the othersystems are as follows. Session participation management terminals detect users’ entrance to conference
rooms (1). Conference participants touch the card reader connected to the terminal placed at the entrance ofeach room with their RFID cards. This signal tells information on the participation action, i.e., “when”,“who”, “which session”, and “where” to the ActionLog system. Presentation management terminals capture
two types of action, i.e., making presentation (2) and attending presentation (3). When making a presentation,
the presenter places her RFID card on the card reader connected to the terminal. This signal directly tells
information on the presentation, i.e., “when”, “who”, and “where”. Referring the conference timetable stored
in the database of Polyphonet Conference, the ActionLog system infers which presentation is made at thistime. At the same time, attending actions to the presentation are inserted to all participants who are in thesame room. Uses of kiosk terminals (4) are also captured and sent to the ActionLog system. By touching withher RFID card, a user can log in to Polyphonet Conference and manage her schedule or view the social
network around her. When two users placed their cards on the reader, the kiosk terminal shows the network
between two. This action, viewing social network (5), is also detected. Table 1 shows these five types ofaction and the captured/inferred contexts.
Table 1. Captured action types and contexts
Action(1) Participating
session(2) Making
presentation(3) Attending
presentation(4) Using kiosk(5) Viewing
social network

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Terminal
Session participation
management terminal
Presentation
management terminal
Presentation
management terminal
Kiosk terminal
Kiosk terminal

Captured context information
User ID, Time, PlaceUser ID, Time, PlaceUser ID, Time, PlaceUser ID, Time
User ID, Time, User whoviews the network with

Inferred context information
Session ID, List of acknowledgements who
participate the same session
Presentation ID, List of acknowledgements
who attend the presentation
Presentation ID, List of acknowledgements
who attend the same presentation

IADIS International Conference on Web Based Communities 2006

3.3 Collecting Users' Actions, Generating and Publishing Weblog Contents
Users' actions are sent by the terminals for the ActionLog system via HTTP POST requests. A terminal sends
a request that includes queries, such as UserID, Place, ActionType, ContextInformation.
ContextInformation depends on its ActionType, which is pre-registered to the ActionLog system.
ActionLog interprets the ContextInformation based on its ActionType, and then it generates thecontents.
The ActionLog system generates a Weblog entry for each action sent from a terminal, interpreting thecontext information of the actions. Interpretation of the context information differs according to the types ofactions. Take a session participation action for example. A participation action is sent from the session
participation management terminal and its directly captured context information is UserID, Time, andPlace. The ActionLog generates a Weblog entry using the following steps:
1. Fetch the ID of the session (SessionID), which is held at the Time in the Place.
2. Fetch the session title associated to the SessionID.
3. Get a list of users who participated the session.
4. Get a list of user's acquaintances from the social network system of Polyphonet Conference.
5. Make an intersection of these two lists.
6. Apply the template and generate the content.
An example of the output is shown in figure 3. These procedures, the content templates, and the typedefinition of the context information are also pre-registered to the ActionLog system.
Participated the session “Session Title” at Place. Friend Name1, Friend Name2, and Friend Name3,
who are my acquaintances, also participated this session.
Figure 3. Example of generated content

Generated contents are inserted to the user's Weblog. The context information, e.g., the presentation that
was attended, the place this action occurred, and so on, is attached to the contents. A user can edit thecontents on the editor page (Figure 4). She can remove or modify the generated sentences, or add new
sentences.
Figure 5 shows a snapshot of the ActionLog system menu page. On the menu page, the captured actions,
i.e., the generated contents, are listed in the box. The user can edit and publish the generated contents. Figure
6 shows the Weblog-style view, which lists the user's published contents in chronological order.

3.4 Aggregating and Sharing Context
Efficient sharing of published contents is achieved through content aggregation. We provide a context-based
aggregation view of contents.
Kaenampornpan et al. (2004) proposed the context model for context-aware systems based on an Activity
Theory (Engestrom 1999). According to the model, contexts are classified to seven elements: User, Tools
and their availability, Rules, Community, Division of Labour, Object, and Time.
In explanation of our proposed system, User is the user herself and the place she is. Tools represent eachterminal. Rules are the norms and the social rules of the conference, and Community includes the people
around the user. Division of Labour is the role in the action, such as presenter or attendee. Object is the targetof the action, such as the presentation that the user attended. Time is the time at which the action occurred.
The Weblog-style view is a person-based view of the contents in chronological order. It includes User,
Community, and Time items. Tools, Division of Labour and Object items are closely related to the type ofaction. We provide aggregation views on the types and targets of actions. We do not target Rules in thissystem.
The basic idea of aggregation is filtering according to context. The system extracts and lists contents
related to the same presentation or the same type of action. The user can look through all contents related tothe context that the user specifies. Figure 7 shows a snapshot of the aggregated view of a certain presentation.
This type of aggregation treats Object contexts. The system also aggregates by type of action. In this case,161

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Figure 4. Editor page of ActionLog

Figure 5. Menu page of ActionLog

Figure 6. Weblog-style view of ActionLog

Figure 7. Presentation-based aggregated view of
ActionLog

Tools and Division of Labour are considered. As we previously mentioned, the personal Weblog-style view
includes User and Community based aggregation. The user can look through all the contents related to thecontext that the user specifies.

4. USAGE ANALYSES AND EVALUATIONS
4.1 Basic Data and Usage Status Data
We tested our system at the 19th annual conference of the Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence(JSAI2005), which held on 15th-17th, June 2005 in Kitakyushu. In this conference, there were 290
presentations in six parallel sessions and 609 authors (including co-authors). About 400 or 500 participantsjoined the conference.
The number of participants who use any terminal at the conference site, i.e., the number of users whose
actions were captured at the site, is 332. Finally 10848 draft entries were generated and 381 entries wereedited and published by 35 users.

4.2 Analyses of Published Entries
To reveal the forms of system usages, we analyzed the published entries in two ways.

4.2.1 Relation between Action Type and Content
Firstly, we checked what was described in the edited and published entries. We read through all publishedentries and marked them with five characteristics, i.e., (1) memorandum, (2) diary, (3) opinion, (4)message, and (5) note about the system. One entry can be marked with multiple characteristics. Table 2
shows the relation between content characteristics and action type. Points where more than half entries are

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marked with the same characteristic are underlined. For example, most of content authors took memorandum
and described their opinions in attending presentation actions. This result shows that capturing variety ofusers’ actions promotes properly use for the purpose, such as reviewing or communicating.
Table 2. Rate of characterized entries for each action
Memorandum

Diary

OpinionMessage

System

28.6%

64.3%

37.5%

10.7%

5.4%

18.2%

63.6%

81.8%

36.4%

9.1%

55.5%

19.5%

78.9%

32.0%

1.6%

Using kiosk

8.7%

69.6%

30.4%

8.7%

13.0%

Viewingsocial network

4.2%

52.1%

56.3%

12.5%

16.7%

Participating
sessionMakingpresentation
Attendingpresentation

4.2.2 Human Relation between Entry Authors and Target Presentation Authors
Next, we analyzed the relation between entry authors and presentation authors, to investigate whom entries
are published for. We compared the rates of related authors in generated drafts and published entries forpresentation attending action. In this analysis, we use the relations managed in Polyphonet Conference. In
draft entries, 23.9% of entries are generated by related authors’ actions. On the other hand, 57.1% arepublished by related authors. This means that the ActionLog system could support communications among
acknowledgements.

4.3 User Evaluations
We requested the system users to evaluate the system on Web-based questionnaire after JSAI2005. Answers
from 45.7% of users who edited and published entries were obtained. The selected questions, which areespecially related to the subject of this paper, are following:
Q1.
Were draft entries generated from your action records helpful?
Q2.
Was information about presentation/session attached to actions helpful?
Q3.
Was ActionLog helpful for reviewing?
Q4.
Was ActionLog helpful for knowing about other participants?
All questions were answered by selecting one option from “5: very helpful”, “4: helpful”, “3: OK”, “2:not very helpful”, and “1: useless”. The average points for each question are: Q1 – 4.00, Q2 – 4.38, Q3 – 4.13,
and Q4 – 3.88. From these results, we believe that expected effects are accomplished.

5. RELATED WORKS
Several conference support systems have been proposed. IntelliBadge (Cox 2003) is an RFID-based
academic conference support system that traces users’ positions and provides location search services forusers. It enhances communication at conference sites, but does not support post-conference communication.
Another system, C-MAP (Sumi 1998), is a personal mobile assistance system for exhibition tours. It is
intended as a location-aware support by sharing experiences and knowledge using mobile terminals like
PDAs. It provides total support in an event space, but does not target integrative support of independent
subsystems in the real world or on the Web.
LifeLog research, like MyLifeBits (Gemmell 2002), is a salient approach to sharing experiences byrecording everything users see and hear. However, our approach is to share users’ subjective experiences
rather than objective records.
SPECTER (Kröner 2004) is a personal journal generation system that generates content based on theusers’ action records. This approach closely resembles our approach, but it is specifically intended to model
users’ behaviors and does not target supporting communications or sharing experiences.

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6. CONCLUSION
This paper proposes the ActionLog system, which supports authoring and sharing Weblog contents for the
purposes of reviewing support and communication support on Academic Conferences. ActionLog collects
users' actions from other information systems placed at a conference site, and automatically generates draftsof the Weblog contents based on the action contexts.
We implemented and applied the system on an actual academic conference as a field test. The resultshows that the system was used both for reviewing their activities and for communicating other participants.
The action-oriented integration is easily extensible. New subsystems are pluggable through “action.” Thismeans that our approach can be applied in various situations. Future work includes designing a system withmore proactive supports. The tested implementation is a limited service in terms of time and place. When we
utilize the system in an open environment, the information that will become available will be enormous sothat a user cannot manage them.

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