A portable and extensible community object

Many community networks have emerged on the Internet. They provide various functionalities to serve the community users. However, most of the community networks lacks of the convenient tools in packaging the information users are interested in. Therefore, the information posted and exchanged in the community networks is not easy to be extracted and reused somewhere else. In another aspect, the functions and services provided by the community networks are not fully satisfactory to most users. The community networks in general do not provide the mechanism to extend or modify the functions or services provided for users. In this paper, we apply the information object model to construct a portable and extensible community object for organize a small and personalized virtual community. An actor object and a community object are applied to serve as a user and a community respectively. The actor object is an entity represents the user. A service which is provided or needed by the user can be installed to the entity as a method of the actor object. Similarly, the community object is an entity represents the community. A service provided by the community can be installed to the community object as a method. In our development, an actor object or a community object is basically an information object which is portable and extensible in functionality. We will describe the basic concept of the actor object and the community object and the design of the prototype system developed on the Web platform.