The small picture is new product categories. New ways of obtaining, maintaining, and sharing knowledge that are a result of these new collective forms. Our research group is actively exploring these possibilities. We have many studies going on, but three systems demonstrate some of the possibilities for expertise networks, as well as the power of this approach. Cascaded DICA agents DICA is a semi-autonomous agent that searches for new information from known sources on the Web.
Users train it over time to do a better and better job of identifying information that is of use.
In this, it is hardly unique, although it has some interesting twists. The point for this paper, however, is that its results can be shared among users for relatively little or no cost. In this model of interaction, each expert does her activity for herself, since she trains her agents for herself in any case. As with all of our efforts, DICA's sharing also allows for a range of expertise, rather than forcing a dichotomy between experts and non-experts. More and more of this type of expertise sharing will most likely exist on the Net over time.