Arkose: Reusing Informal Information in Online Communities

TitleArkose: Reusing Informal Information in Online Communities
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2007
AuthorsNam, KK, Ackerman, MS
Conference NameACM Group 2007 Conference
KeywordsArkose, collaborative distillation, collective help applications, community knowledge, design rationale, iDiag, incremental formalization, information access, information distillation, information organization, information reuse, knowledge communities, knowledge management, online communities
Abstract

Online discussions such as a large-scale community brainstorming often end up with an unorganized bramble of ideas and topics that are difficult to reuse. A process of distillation is needed to boil down a large information space into information that is concise and organized. We take a system-augmented approach to the problem by creating a set of tools with which human editors can collaboratively distill a large amount of informal information.Two design principles, which we will define as incremental diagenesis and incremental summarization, help editors flexibly distill the informal information. Our system, Arkose, is built as a demonstration of these principles, providing the necessary tools for distillation. These tools include a number of visualization and information retrieval mechanisms, as well as an authoring tool and a navigator for the information space. They support a gradual increase in the order and reusability of the information space and allow various levels of intermediate states of a distillation.

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