Design and Evaluation of Mutual Awareness Function in Social Bookmarking Service to Foster Collaborative Information Gathering

概要

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Scientific researchers need support for their information gathering from the Web, because the growth of Internet accessibility raises the problem of Internet information overload. Social Bookmarking Service (SBS) is a promising technology to solve the problem by the benefit of collaborative information gathering. The paper describes the design and evaluation of a novel function of SBS to foster collaborative information gathering by providing mutual awareness information about browsing behaviors of SBS users. This information increases the probabilities of discovering the useful information by recommending the potential collaborators to the user. A case study on an experimental SBS was performed to evaluate the feasibility of the mutual awareness information for individuals and research communities. In order to verify the validity of the design quantitatively, an experiment was conducted using agent-based simulation based on an extension of the SIR model for epidemics. The results, either from the case study or the agent-based simulation, argue the effectiveness of the proposed function to provide mutual awareness information for fostering collaborative information gathering in SBS.