This paper describes a new software agent, the community search assistant, which recommends related searches to users of search engines. The community search assistant enables communities of users to search in a collaborative fashion. All queries submitted by the community are stored in the form of a graph. Links are made between queries that are found to be related. Users can peruse the network of related queries in an ordered way: following a path from a first cousin, to a second cousin to a third cousin, etc. to a set of search results. The first key idea behind the use of query graphs is that the determination of relatedness depends on the documents returned by the queries, not on the actual terms in the queries themselves. The second key idea is that the construction of the query graph transforms single user usage of information networks (e.g. search) into collaborative usage: all users can tap into the knowledge base of queries submitted by others. Introduction ...

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Recommender systems selectively circulate information enriched with comments and feedback based on people's experience. These systems filter information in a semi-automatic and high-quality way in order to support a community during their work or leisure practices. However recommender systems are usually separate tools that require a degree of effort to be used, both when receiving information and to insert new feedback. In this paper we present our informal experiences with the use of multiple user interfaces (interactive large screen, email, paper and PDA) as means to improve the diffusion of information through an organizational unit and to improve access to information stored within an existing recommender system.

Nowadays people have to deal with an increasing amount of information contained in electronic documents available from numerous heterogeneous, widely distributed sources. Keeping up to date with recently published material relevant to a particular topic has become a challenge in itself. The Yaka system aims at facilitating this task by providing notification and delivery services. Yaka relies on a flexible definition of subjects through intelligent wrapping of existing information sources. Users can subscribe to these subjects in order to be notified whenever new relevant documents are published. Yaka augments document notification with document meta-information obtained through a set of integrated linguistic services. From the notification message users can directly request the document content. Yaka then delivers this content, automatically transformed into the appropriate format, through a variety of delivery media. In this article, we describe the Yaka functionality, its architecture and how we deployed it within Xerox.

In this paper we describe a multi-agent system, called COWING that aims at enabling an organised group of people to share their results of information searching on the World Wide Web. Users normally save relevant sites they found in their private collections of bookmarks. The goal of the proposed system is to enable users to share their bookmarks, in an implicit, secure and effective way. By implicit we mean that users are not required to spend extra effort in order to use the system. Secure sharing refers to the capacity of each user to control who knows what about her/his own bookmark collections. Finally effectiveness is ensured by recommending users with relevant bookmarks that are computed by applying a distributed collaborative filtering algorithm. Recommended bookmarks are automatically inserted in the most appropriate bookmark folder in the user's local collection. When accessing a folder the user can evaluate (accept or reject) provided recommendations. Our system is a multi-agent system where each user is associated to an assistant agent, called a WING agent. A WING agent observes the user's behaviour when managing her/his own bookmark collection. It learns how the user classifies her/his bookmarks. A hybrid neural/case-based reasoning supervised classifier is used for this purpose. WING agents exchange bookmarks according to a defined collaboration protocol that protects associated users privacy.

Summary. After identifying the key challenges of knowledge management and proposing a vision that address them, this paper explores how cognitive agents can be used to design management systems that implement this vision and that in particular support the knowledge management processes in both their social, organizational and individual dimension.

Community networks are community-oriented information and communication systems that are generally patterned after the public library's model of free, inclusive service and commitment to universal access. To serve the community network objectives it is therefore important to have easy and widespread information access. In this paper we present the Campiello system that proposes both enhanced information services and complementary user interfaces to better serve the community network objectives. Enhancement of the services is obtained by introducing collaborative filtering functions to support easier navigation in the information space of the community. To extend access to the community network, a paper-based interface is used, that supports exchange of information with the network, from physical locations spread in town. A large screen based interface is also used, which provides collective easy entry points to the most recent and relevant community information.

While systems supporting communities of practice in work organizations have been shown to be desirable many, if not all, are decoupled from daily work practices and tools. This hinders a wide collection of data about their activities, because of the additional effort that is required from the users. Therefore a pre-requisite for a system aiming at making visible the community activity is the non-intrusive collection of data about the activities that are carried on in a workplace. We present a range of personal document management services that support the construction of a collective memory of user print activities. We have internally tested the system and verified that it successfully provided personal benefit, thereby ensuring that the system receives sufficient usage for the shared memory to be useful. The system also successfully addressed privacy concerns and effectively provided large data sets about document related activities. Finally it provided information able to trigger new or to reinforce existing informal exchanges in communities of practice at a convenient moment; the print action.

Bookmark systems are now recognised as a practical mean that allow users to land mark interesting sites in the huge information space that constitute the World Wide Web. In this paper we argue that, by building collaborative bookmark management tools where a group of people can share their experiences and their results in feeding and organising personal bookmark sets, bookmarks can be transformed into effective customized web spaces. In this paper we first present a study of main requirements that a shared bookmark system should meet. Then the design space of such applications is analysed. The set of identified requirements is used to compare and criticise main collaborative shared bookmark systems that are proposed in the literature. Main drawbacks of existing systems are a) the weak customisation of shared spaces, b) the lack of efficient and easy to use privacy protection policies, and c) the adoption of centralised architectures that affects badly responsiveness, availability and d...

This paper proposes to extend current Knowledge Management Systems with functionalities that (1) support the organization in better managing its tacit knowledge; (2) help engage users in a continuous and dynamic knowledge exchange; (3) provide more tailored and active support to the users and in particular take into account their competence, their role in the organization, their social network, or their cognitive style.