SmartCourier: An annotation system for adaptive information sharing

Abstract

SmartCourier is a Web-based system for browsing electronic documents shared in a group of people. It allows users to annotate on the documents with a pen interface, and share the annotations among the users having similar interests on the documents. Also, the system recommends a user unread documents inferred interesting to the user by using a collaborative filtering method. We prototyped two versions of SmartCourier. The first version used a method to matchmake users according to agreement of annotated area on the same documents without any semantic processing of the annotations and the base documents. The second version employed a method to extract keywords from the annotated area of the base documents and find other related documents sharing the keywords. The experimented evaluation shows the second version of SmartCourier was accepted by the users as more efficient system for facilitating knowledge interaction among them.