Patent ID: 7693836

Claim:
A computer implemented method for automatically determining, in an on-line community, any of importance of an on-line asset, topic of said asset, a user's current context/topic of interest, and relationships among users, without asking said on-line community's members directly, comprising the processor executed steps of: observing individual and community usage by a community of peers and experts; employing automatic techniques to extract patterns from said usage; identifying usefulness of an online asset by observing user implicit behaviors in connection with said usage patterns of said online asset and by extracting behavioral patterns from said observations; refining said identified online asset usefulness by context, wherein the context of each online asset is automatically detected based on observed terms/topics from individual and group user behaviors when said online asset is determined to be useful based upon said individual and group user behaviors; determining a user's current context/topic based on an aggregation of the identified context of each online asset that the said user has found useful during their navigation, where an asset's contribution to the aggregate context is weighted by an asset's recency of use; refining said identified user context based on searches performed during the user's navigation, where a search's contribution to the aggregate context is weighted by the recency of the search; comparing the identified context of the current user with previously identified contexts of other users and assigning to each user a similarity score based on its similarity to the current user's context; and using said similarity score to automatically determine each user's peer group; said observed usage patterns comprising user online search, navigation, and interaction behavior, said behavior including any of searches performed and position in user trail, assets viewed and position in user trail, dwell, range, scrolling, think time, and mouse movement on an asset, anchors and lines used in asset text, virtual bookmarks and virtual printing, and explicit downloading, emailing, printing, saving, and removing to and/or from a computer hardware memory.