Automatic knowledge discovery from texts (KDT) is proving to be a promising method for businesses today to deal with the overload of textual information. In this paper, we first explore the possibilities for KDT to enhance communication in virtual communities, and then we present a practical case study with real-life Internet data. The problem in the case study is to manage the very successful ...

In recent years developments in gaming technology have focused on Massively Multi-User Persistent Worlds. This virtual communities host thousands of users interacting with each other through the Internet in real time. Such communities require new distributed programming paradigms for implementing the virtual life management. In this work we present a practical methodology to add Virtual Agents ...

Virtual communities are not only used to share information among their members with common interests, but also an avenue of entertainments, networking with friends, and shopping. Recently, the main research topics on them include social networking, success factors, reasons for participating, and consequences from joining in virtual communities. Relative few works to discuss what important quali...

In this paper, we propose a model for an open framework that allows mobile users to create and to participate to context-aware virtual communities. The model we propose and implement is a generic data model fully compliant with the semantic web data model RDF. This model is suited to let mobile end-users use, create and customize virtual communities. We combine fundamentals for a decentralized ...

More and more firms make use of virtual communities to interact with customers, particularly in the light of open innovation. Although companies invest enormous effort in developing virtual communities just a minority of these succeed. That means that firms were either unable to recruit the critical mass of users or to motivate users to publish and discuss generated content on the platform. Loo...

Effective communication helps communities to achieve common goals, but is especially hard to achieve in virtual adversarial collaborative communities. In these communities, the matching of widely differing objectives as well as interests is very complex. We study a case of a virtual adversarial collaborative community in which the common goal was to author reports assessing the amount of true c...

This paper investigates the antecedents of member retention for virtual communities. This research theorizes the motivating mechanism from both perspectives of the information seekers and providers. Four antecedents communication breadth, depth, responsiveness, and cross-posting have a statistically significant influence on member retention. Furthermore, we have found that communication breadth...

Virtual communities are becoming increasingly popular, particularly on the Internet, as a means for like-minded individuals to pursue common goals. It is a way to access and to share knowledge and information among participants of such communities without physical or hardware constraints. The concept of a community of interest can be supported in a virtual community in order to bring the approp...

In this paper, we propose a model for an open framework that allows mobile users to create and to participate to context-aware virtual communities. The model we propose and implement is a generic data model fully compliant with the semantic web data model RDF. This model is suited to let mobile end-users use, create and customize virtual communities. We combine fundamentals for a decentralized ...