Most existing 3D virtual worlds are based on a ”meeting-space”model, conceived as an extension of textual chat systems. An attractive 3D interface is assumed to be sufficient to encourage the emergence of a community. We look at some alternative models of virtual communities, and explore the issue of promoting community formation in a 3D meeting space. We identify some essential or desirable fe...

one copy of any article(s) in SHURA to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. Community Care is an area that requires extensive cooperation between independent agencies, each of which needs to meet its own objectives and targets. None are engaged ...

Currently, in most fault simulators physical defects have to be modeled as stuck-at faults in networks of primitive gates such as AND, NAND etc. Especially for complex gates this modeling technique is rather inexact. In this paper, a fault simulation approach supporting a more powerful and variable fault model is presented. Speciication of faults is done in a cell oriented manner. To achieve ma...

ABsTrAcT This BLOCKINchapter BLOCKINprovides BLOCKINa BLOCKINclassification BLOCKINof BLOCKINvirtual BLOCKINcommunities BLOCKINof BLOCKINpractice BLOCKINaccording BLOCKINto BLOCKINmethods BLOCKINand BLOCKINtools offered to virtual community members for the knowledge management and the interaction process. It underlines how these methods and tools support users during the exchange of knowledge, ...

The purpose of this article is to illustrate the concept of the NetAcademy for the design and implementation of online learning communities as collaborative learning environments. This paper describes the concept and realization of the NetAcademy platform dealing with its component-based design based on the media concept. After explaining the motivation of the research as an introduction in the...

Although enthusiasm for the “killer-application” in the mobile sector has decreased, location based services still seem to be valuable mobile services. Today’s location based services are mostly forced to use the proprietary location information provided by mobile network operators. The approach that is discussed here depicts a way of locating a mobile client independently from certain network ...

Trust has been a long-standing issue in online communities and is gaining importance with the popularity of online social networks. Traditional trust models theorize and explain trust, but they do not directly provide operationalization of trust relationships. In view that the text is the dominant medium of online communication, this paper develops a text-based model for identifying online trus...

Linguistic alignment in text-based communication means that people tend to adjust their language use to one another both in terms of word choice and sentence structure. Previous studies about linguistic alignment suggested that these two forms of adaptation are correlated with each other, and that they build up to alignment at a higher representational level, such as pragmatic alignment for sup...

Trade promotion programs are pivotal to driving sales, building brand equity with consumers and strengthening channel partnerships. The average consumer packaged goods (CPG) company allocates 14% of its total revenue to trade promotion activities1, which underlines the importance of these programs. Despite growing trade promotion budgets, many companies simply anniversary the prior year’s trade...

Virtual Knowledge Communities (VKC) are current popular media on the internet through which the access and sharing of knowledge and information among communities of similar interest groups are made possible. Agent’s technologies are presently being deployed to facilitate the success of VKC, which is a virtual place where knowledge agents can meet, communicate and interact among themselves. Rece...