A System for Community Information Sharing andits Evaluation at an International Conference
333Harumi Maeda , Masao Kajihara , Hidekazu Adachi ,y3

Atsushi Sawada , Hideaki Takedaand Toyoaki Nishida

3Graduate School of Information Science,Nara Institute of Science and Technology
8916-5 Takayama, Ikoma, Nara, 630-0101 Japan
Phone: +81-743-72-5265, Fax: +81-743-72-5269
E-mail: fharumi-m, masao-k, hideka-a, takeda, nishidag@is.aist-nara.ac.jp
yData Processing Center, Kyoto University
Yoshida{Honmachi, Sakyo, Kyoto, 606{8601 Japan
Phone: +81-75-753-7418, Fax: +81-75-753-7452
E-mail: sawada@rd.kudpc.kyoto-u.ac.jp
3Abstract

We discuss the requirements for information sharing in community. We propose the weak information structures to integrate heterogeneous information such as static information (e.g. local sitesinformation) and dynamic information created inword-of-mouth communication. We have developed a system using the weak information structures for community information sharing called
InfoCommon and evaluated it at the ICMAS'96
Mobile Assistant Project.

1

Introduction

The World Wide Web has become popular for information sharing on the Internet. As large-scaleinformation resources on the Internet are increasing rapidly, it becomes more and more dicult toobtain information we need. Although a numberof search tools are available, there are few intelligent systems which help us reorganize vast information obtained from the Internet from our pointof view. We focus on the following problems in
information sharing on the WWW. (1) It is dicult for users to get information they need whenthe menu structures of hypertexts are di erent
from user knowledge about topics. (2) If search
results are too many when using search engines,
it is dicult for users to nd useful informationfrom them.
In this paper, we focus on a kind of commu-nities in which a group of people meet together
and are united by shared interests. We attempt tobuild a system to support community information
sharing using an information representation called
the weak information structures which are weaker
than well-de ned knowledge representations suchas rst-order logics and frames.
We discuss the requirements for community
information sharing. We then propose the weak
information structures to integrate heterogeneous
information such as static information (e.g. local
sites information) and dynamic information created in word-of-mouth communication.
We have developed an information sharing system called InfoCommon which provides people withintelligent assistance for exchanging and sharing
knowledge and ideas. We have evaluated InfoCommon at the ICMAS'96 Mobile Assistant Project[1].
In what follows, rst we analyze requirements
for community information sharing and describe
the weak information structures. We then present
InfoCommon and experimental results at the ICMAS'96 Mobile Assistant Project and present discussion.
2Issues in Community Information Sharing

2.1

Important Information

Community is a \group of people living together
and/or united by shared interests, religion, nationality." In this paper, we focus on a kind of

communities in which people meet together andare united by shared interests.
By the above de nition, local sites information where people meet together and informationthat people share interests is important. Personal
information is also important to activate humanhuman interaction.
In addition, it is known that informal information created in word-of-mouth communication isessential to support community information sharing.
2.2

Hypothesis of Information Activity in Network Communities

As computer network technologies progress, virtual communities in which people do not live together and which are supported by computer networks have been formed. Netnews, Mailing-lists
and Forums are such systems which support virtual communities. We call such communities \network communities."
We analyze how network communities areformed on mailing-lists.
Firstly, friends or companions who have thesame/similar interests start a mailing-list. In thebeginning, acquaintances of founders participate
in. Newcomers then take part in when they happen to know the mailing-list by word-of-mouth orwatching publicity.
First Messages created by newcomers are mainly
questions except for self-introduction. This is because most of newcomers participate in the mailinglist to get information they need.
Newcomers try to nd information by themselves in vain, and ask other members. They get
chances to talk with and know others by asking
questions, and they are recognized by others aswell. Discussions seldom occur unless people do
not know the people with whom they want to talk.
We set up a hypothesis that there are a seriesof processes for newcomers in information activity in network communities: \search ! asking !
knowing people ! discussion." We think that
helping these processes facilitates community information sharing.
In addition, we claim that the existence of special people who answer others' questions and encourage others to send messages is important toactivate network communities.
2.3

Requirements Analysis for Community Information Sharing

From considerations described in the previous section, we analyze the requirements to build a suc-cessful system for community information sharing.
(1) Contents of information are important. For
example, local sites, personal, word-of-mouth information and information that people share interests should be stored.
(2) Special members assist general users to use
the system.
(3) The system supports information activity
in network communities: \search ! asking !
knowing people ! discussion."(4) Users can access heterogeneous information from the users' point of view with/without
menus.
(5) Users can integrate and reorganize personal and public information.
In addition, in order to use mobile terminals,
we must consider the following issues to overcome
the limitations of them.
(6) The system should have easy and simple
user-interface.
(7) Interaction between mobile terminals andthe server should be reduced.
3

Weak Information Structures

The weak information structures connect a wide
variety of information media such as natural language texts, hypertexts and images without de ning the semantics rigorously. By leaving the interpretation of the semantics to tacit human background knowledge inherently shared with people,
they become compact and robust. Moreover, theweak information structures are easy to generatefrom raw data for both of humans and computers.
In community information sharing, the weak
information structures are used to integrate heterogeneous information such as static information(e.g. local sites information) and dynamic information created in word-of-mouth communication.
We believe that background knowledge shared bymembers can be utilized to understand the meaning of the relations.
4InfoCommon

We have developed a shared-card information sharing system called InfoCommon which allows seamless keyword-based access to a variety of information cards to support community informationsharing.

InfoCommon Information Base

PDA

Knowledge Base

Information
Retrieval
InfoCommon
ServerRetrieval
Information Card Base

Information
Sending
Sending

User

RetrievalMonitoringNewsSending

Session

Abstracts

ProfilesLocal

InfoCommon
Information
Volunteer

Figure 1: overview of InfoCommon
4.1

Architecture

is composed of (a) PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) possessed by users, (b) InfoCommon information server which handles user
requests and (c) News server which stores user
messages and (d) InfoCommon information base.
The InfoCommon information base consists of (d1)a knowledge base which links keywords and information cards using the weak information structures and (d2) an information card base which
stores static information (Figure 1).
In addition, InfoCommon information volunteers (a) answer to user questions as the help desk
to activate communications and (b) add information cards and adjust the weak information structures to improve search results.
InfoCommon

4.2

supports the following functions.

Given
a set of keywords, InfoCommon will respond withthe set of information cards connected to the keywords. The result of retrieval is stored in theuser's local information base where the user can
re-arrange the collection of information cards, andadd/remove nodes/links as desired.

Content-based Information Retrieval

Information Sending (Posting News)

Info-is built on a conventional News service.
Users can send messages to the News server. Thesemessages are viewed as message cards in InfoCommon.
CommonUsers can edit andreorganize gathered information and message cards
and personal memoranda.
Personalizing Information

4.3

 step 1: to remove unnecessary words/symbols

from the input string and to expand keywords referring synonyms

 step 2: to select card candidates by full-text \AND" search step 3: to select card candidates by full-text \OR" search when card candidates arenot selected by step 2

 step 4: to add card candidates by path-nding of the weak information structuresand generate links

 step 5: to de ne maximum 10 1 cards fromcard candidates using prede ned weights

Functions

InfoCommon

Figure 2: Screen Image of InfoCommon

Search Algorithm

This section describes the algorithm which nds
a set of cards when the server receives user input
in information retrieval.

The weak information structures which are referred in step 4 are de ned by (1) prede ned relations between cards, (2) prede ned relations between concepts or (3) relations of cards de ned byusers or information volunteers.
4.4

User Interface

The information unit in InfoCommon is called\card." There are three kinds of cards: (a) aninformation card is a piece of static information
stored in the information card base, (b) a message
card is a piece of dynamic information created byusers, which is stored in the News server, and (c)a memo card is a piece of users' personal memoranda, which is stored in PDAs.
InfoCommon provides visual interface for retrieving and sending cards. A relation between
cards is denoted by a link.
Figure 2 shows an example when a user inputs\daibutsu, temple" in information retrieval. Anicon of the card \Todaiji Temple" which is related
to both of \daibutsu (great image of Budda)" and\temple" is shown in the middle of the screen.
1 screen size of PDA and usability are concerned

Some card icons which are related to \Todaiji
Temple" such as \Nandaimon Gate" and \Daibutsuden Hall" (these are buildings of Todaiji Temple) are linked with the card icon of \Todaiji Temple". A card icon of \Model Course around NaraPark" is shown but not linked with that of \Todaiji Temple", because the former and the latterare not related directly.

5040num. of30answers(%) 2018 (22%)

106 (7%)

Social Experiment at theFigure 3: Purpose

Pro ject

5.1

30
number20ofanswers(%) 100

ICMAS'96 Mobile Assistant Project

ICMAS'96 is the Second International Conference
on Multiagent Systems, which was held in December 9 - 13 of 1996 in Kyoto, Japan.
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation(NTT), Kyoto University, and Nara Institute ofScience and Technology jointly planned the ICMAS'96 Mobile Assistant Project. It is the worldrst experiment in applying mobile computing systems to community support. 100 personal intelligent communicators with handy phones wereloaned to conference participants to actually tryout the system[1].
5.2

Overview of Experimental Results ofInfoCommon

The InfoCommon information base stored static
information such as abstracts of papers, session,
local sites information and participants' pro les.
The number of information retrievals was 351 andinformation sending was 32 over the 5 day period.
In what follows, we analyze how InfoCommon
was used by examining the log le and questionnaires in details.
5.3

Analysis

5.3.1

PurposeAnswers to the question \For what did you used
InfoCommon ?" are shown in Figure 3. 59% used
the system for information retrieval and 18% for
information sending including News(11%), help
desk(7%) and discussion.

0 (0%)

information help dis- news others not used
retrievaldesk cussion

ICMAS'96 Mobile AssistantWe evaluated the usefulness of InfoCommon at theICMAS'96 Mobile Assistant Project.

9 (11%)
1 (0%)05

49 (59%)24 (33%)13 (18%)12 (16%)
11 (15%)8 (11%)
5 (7%)
research presen- sight- restau- people others
tation seeing rant

Figure 4: Topic
5.3.2

Comparison with Traditional Newsreader

In this experiment, 3 services were prepared whichaccess to 17 Newsgroups: InfoCommon, a traditional Newsreader system and an information navigation system[2]. Users could read and post messages in each newsgroup using the Newsreader. In
contrast, users could access messages regardless ofnewsgroups based on keywords in InfoCommon.
32 out of 48 messages (67%) were posted via
InfoCommon.
The answer to the question \Which service did
you mainly use for reading News ?" is as follows; Newsreader 33 persons (64%), InfoCommon
14 persons (27%), other 4 persons (9%).
About \Which service did you mainly use forposting News ?": Newsreader 9 persons (52%), InfoCommon 7 persons (41%), other 1 person (1%).
The reasons as to why InfoCommon was used
for News are described as follows: \Because keyword search was easy and useful (14 persons)",\Because I found interesting topics in InfoCommon(5 persons)" and \Because I had a question(4 persons)".
We determined that InfoCommon added new
facility to the conventional Newsreader.
5.3.3

TopicAnswers to the question \For what topic did you
use InfoCommon" are displayed in Figure 4: research(33%), presentation(18%), people(16%),
sightseeing(15%) and restaurant(11%) and others(7%).

Table 1: Frequently Asked Keywords
12
3
4
5
6
7

keywordcount

icstatnara
fipa
keihannaagent
nishimura
food

50
24
15
12
10
8
6

7
9
9
9
9
940

keyword

count

lunch
banqueticsuggest
kamameshi
restaurant
shuttle65
5
555

number20ofanswers
1015 (26%)
10 (17%)02 (0%)

1 (0%)

very good moderate bad
goodverybad

Figure 5: Search Results
5.3.4

Statistics

5.3.5

Search Results

Figure 5 shows answers to the question \How did
you feel the search results of InfoCommon?" 81%felt that the search results were ne (very good +good + moderate) as shown in Figure 5.
5.3.6

Satisfaction

51% answered that they were satis ed with InfoCommon(Figure 6).
30
number20ofanswers(%) 10030 (51%)
20 (34%)9 (15%)

satisfied

0others
notsatisfied

Figure 6: Satisfaction4030

23 (41%)20
num. ofans. (%)
1020num. ofans. (%)
10notothers
useful011 (21%) 10 (19%)

6 (11%)

6 (11%)
useful32 (60%)27 (48%)30

19 (34%)(a)usefulnotothers
useful(b)Figure 7: Usefulness

0usefulnotothers
useful(c)Usefulness

55% answered that InfoCommon was useful for
getting the information they need (Figure 7(a)).
On the other hand, 48% answered that it was notuseful for knowing people (Figure 7(b)), 60% for
discussion (Figure 7(c)). The results indicate thatthe system is useful for information retrieval but
not for knowing people nor discussion.
6Table 1 shows the ranking of frequently asked keywords in information retrieval. The most frequent
input word was \icstat," a special keyword to display statistics concerning frequently asked keywords and frequently discussed subjects. This result suggests that users used InfoCommon to knowwhat other people are interested in and/or what
are hot topics before information retrieval or sending. We found that such statistics are useful forsharing information among participants.

40

31 (55%)20num. ofans. (%)
105.3.7

30 (52%)30

30

6.1Discussion
Contents of Information in Community Information Sharing

The result of questionnaires shows that (a) local
sites information such as restaurants and sightseeing, (b) personal information and (c) information
about research and presentations were searched.
In addition, it is found that statistics are usefulby analyzing the log le. These result support theissues raised in section 2 and suggest that people
are interested in what others are interested in.
6.2

InfoCommon as an Information Retrieval Tool

We analyze that the following results support thatis useful as an information retrieval
tool for community; (a) 81% felt that search results were ne, (b) 51% were satis ed the system,and (c) 55% answered that the system was usefulfor information retrieval. We consider the results
are supporting evidence of that people who shareinterests in community can have common background knowledge and they can understand themeaning of the semantics of the weak informationstructures.
InfoCommon

6.3

InfoCommon as an Information Exchange Tool

The result that 32 messages out of 48 (67%) werevia InfoCommon suggests the InfoCommon can beuseful as an information exchange tool. We analyzed this because of simple user-interface andavailability of information volunteers. In addition,
the comparison with the traditional Newsreader
suggests that InfoCommon does not replace thetraditional Newsreader but add new functions toit.
6.4

Hypothesis of Information Activity in Network Communities

We attempt to evaluate whether the system is useful about the hypothesis of information activity
in communities: \search ! asking ! knowing
people ! discussion" that we set up in section
2. (1) We evaluate that the system supported
the process \search" from the results of questionnaires. (2) The process of \search ! ask" is partially supported by the system because the log
le shows that some users asked questions after
information retrieval. (3) Half of users answeredthat the system was not useful for \knowing people." However, we consider that this is because
there were other systems in which users can access participants information without connecting
the server[3] and users did not need to use InfoCommon for the purpose. We expect that InfoCommon is useful for knowing people and try toverify it in the future. (4) The process of \discussion" cannot be supported by InfoCommon.
We feel that the time period was too short toform the kind of community in which people create many active discussions. We need to conduct
a longer-term experiment to evaluate the usefulness of the system for discussion in the future.
7

Related WorkCYC[4] and ARPA Knowledge Sharing E ort [5][6]have made a signi cant contribution in the sense
they shed light on the importance of knowledge
and information sharing and that they have presented a self-completed computational model. Theirapproach orients computer information sharing whileours is for human information sharing.
Gaines[7] uses semantic networks as information representation for group knowledge sharing.
Our approach is based on much weaker information representation than semantic networks.
8Conclusions

We have presented requirements for community
information sharing. We then proposed the weak

to integrate heterogeneous
information such as static information (e.g. localsites information) and dynamic information created in word-of-mouth communication.
We developed an information sharing systemfor community called InfoCommon which provides
people with intelligent assistance for exchanging
and sharing knowledge and ideas. We evaluatedInfoCommon at the ICMAS'96 Mobile Assistant
Project.
As a future research, We plan to conduct alonger-term experiment to evaluate the usefulnessof the system for discussion.
information structures

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