Discovering Collaborators by Analyzing Trails Through an Information Space
David W. Payton · 1998
We describe a system for helping people discover potential collaborators. Similarities between people are found by comparing the items they access on the World-Wide-Web. Using people's browsing patterns to establish document similarity, we find matches between people without having to analyze the content of the information they access. Introduction As organizations continue to grow more complex, people have increasing difficulty remaining aware of others whose work could impact their own. Despite the rapid proliferation of our communication networks, we often hear the complaint "the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing." This is a particularly important issue within large organizations and could be reduced if people could more easily discover potential collaborators. As organizations continuously re-organize, it is often the case that one person comes to be working on the solution to a problem that someone else has already solved. Or it could happen that a particu...