Augmented analytical exploitation of a scientific forum

Abstract

In reality, group work, especially various meetings, exists as a feasible way for people to communicate and collaborate to deal with problems. Various academic meetings and conferences serve as an important part of social process toward scientific knowledge growth. It is significant to understand more about the outcome of those meetings for maintaining the scale of those dialogues and facilitating policy making. In this paper, some augmented analytical methods are applied to a famous scientific forum on frontiers of science and technology in China, Xiangshan Science Conference, to expose some ignored information which is eagerly required by conference organizers, policy makers and researchers. Those methods, such as visualization of expert opinion structure, augmented information support by Web text-mining, clustering of contributed ideas and various analysis about individual's participation, etc. are integrated into a group argumentation environment (GAE), which aims to support divergent group thinking process for emergence of a ba for knowledge creation and provide a variety of perspectives towards the concerned topics by those addressed conferencing mining techniques. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.