Facilitating Human Communications in Personalized Information Space
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 sacle, 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 daily encounters in the real world, which are 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.