Facilitating Human Communications in Personalized Information Spaces

Contents

There has been an increase in creative activities being done using networked computers, due to the increase in the number of people accessing the Internet. The Internet can be characterized by its global scale, ability of bi-directional communications, and high publicity. Our target is to develop a system that facilitates novel human communications, which has yet to be seen in the real world, with the support of the Internet. We propose a system concept of interactive and asynchronous collaboration and communications in information spaces structured through personal viewpoints of all participants. The method presented in this paper makes possible for a user accessing the WWW (World-Wide Web) to encounter other people who have similar interests. This encounter is definitely different from our dally encounters in the real world, which axe mostly limited with personal relationships, and spatial and temporal coincidence. In order to provide a virtual space for the encounters, we employ a method that visualizes personal viewpoints by mapping icons of text-objects and keywords given by users into metric spaces. We are developing a system that visualizes personal viewpoints of contents and opinions appeared in personal pages of the WWW.