Weak Information Structure for Human Information Sharing

This paper demonstrates the e ectiveness of the weak information structure for human information sharing. The weak information structure is an information representation which connects various information media without de ning the semantics rigorously. By leaving the interpretation of the semantics to tacit human background knowledge, it becomes compact and robust. To investigate how e ective the weak information structure is in real world problems, we test two cases and report our results. (1) We have developed a system called CM-2 which gathers and reorganizes information on the Internet. Concerning precision and recall rate, the results are between 68{ 90%. (2) We have developed a system called InfoCommon which supports information sharing in community. More than 50% of users answer that the system is useful for getting information they need.