Facilitating community awareness with associative representation

We describe information sharing in a community using associative representation. The associative representation links heterogeneous information without defining the semantics strictly. We leave the interpretation of the semantics to human tacit knowledge. We have developed a system called CoMeMo-Community which gathers community members' information automatically and helps the members with sharing it. Our system has a two layer structure that consists of the personal information-space called "Personal Knowledge Layer" and the common information-space called "Common knowledge Layer". In the system, agents that are created by users as the users' alter ego at the Personal Knowledge Layer interact with other agents at the Common Knowledge Layer in place of the users. We have evaluated the system with preliminary experiments. The results suggest that the system enables community members to facilitate communication by sharing each members' information.