Proposal and analysis of a community system using personal networks

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss importance and utilization of personal network in a community system through the result of management and analysis of the scheduling support system for academic conferences. The important feature of the system is generation and utilization of personal network to support information exchanging and information discovery among participants. We applied this system to the academic conference called JSAI2003. We obtained 276 users and their personal networks. We found that (1) most participants were willing to contribute to form personal networks, (2) personal networks can promote information exchanging among participants since personal network showed existence of participants to the others and (3) the formed networks can was useful for them in information recommendation.