Collecting, visualizing, and exchanging personal interests and experiences in communities

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a notion of facilitating encounters and knowledge sharing among people having shared interests and experiences in museums, conferences, etc. In order to show our approach and current status, this paper presents our project to build a communityware system situated in real-world contexts. The aims of the project are to build a tour guidance system personalized according to its user’s individual contexts, and to facilitate knowledge communications among communities by matchmaking users having shared interests and providing real and/or virtual places for their meetings. In this paper, we first show PalmGuide, hand-held tour guidance system. After that, we show two Web-based systems to increase the level of “community-awareness”. One is Semantic Map, a visual interface for exploring community information, such as exhibits and people (exhibitors and visitors). Another is AgentSalon, a display showing conversations between personal agents according to their users’ profiles and interests.