Supporting federated information sharing communities (abstract only)
Bicheng Liu · 2004
Increasingly, the World Wide Web is being viewed as a means of creating web communities rather than simply as a means of publishing and delivering documents and services. In this research we develop the concept of Federated Information Sharing Communities (FISC), and associated architecture, that enables community-centred information systems to be constructed. Such systems provide a way for organisations, distributed workgroups and individuals to build up a federated community based on their common interests over the World Wide Web. To support communities, we develop capabilities that go beyond the generic retrieval of documents to include the ability to retrieve people, their interests and inter-relationships. We focus on providing social awareness "in the large" to help users understand the members within a community and the relationships between them: who is working on what topic, and who is working with whom. Within the FISC framework, we provide a viewpoint retrieval service to enable a user to construct visual contextual views of the community from the perspective of any community member. To evaluate these ideas we develop test beds to compare individual component technologies such as user and group profile construction and similarity matching, and we develop prototypes (Web Network and "CiteSeer Community") to explore the broader architecture and usage issues.