Supporting the awareness of shared interests and experiences in communities

In this paper, we propose a notion of facilitating encounters and knowledge sharing among people having shared interests and experiences in museums, conferences, etc. In order to show our approach and its current state, this paper presents our project to build a communityware system situated in real-world contexts. The aims of the project are to build a tour guidance system personalized according to its user’s individual contexts, and to facilitate knowledge communications among communities by matchmaking users having shared interests and providing real and/or virtual places for their meetings. In this paper, we first show PalmGuide, a hand-held tour guidance system. After that, we show two systems designed to increase the level of ‘‘community awareness’’. One is called Semantic Map, a visual interface for exploring community information, such as exhibits and people (focusing on exhibitors and visitors). The other is called AgentSalon, a display showing conversations between personal agents according to their users’ profiles and interests. # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd.