In this paper we present a survey of the methods used by a selection of successful free andopen source projects to exchange, store and retrieve knowledge. In particular, we look into mailing lists, Internet Relay Chat, conferences, and code reviews. We explore how historical records left during the development become stored knowledge that can be subsequently retrieved. We also discuss the exist...

The Ambient Wood project, carried out as part of the Equator IRC, set out to provide an augmented learning experience for children in an outdoor environment. Using a variety of devices, the children gathered information about the woodland habitats performing basic scientific enquiry and hypothesis testing. In this paper we describe the supporting information infrastructure used in the project, ...

We present an algorithm for detecting IRC-like chat networks that does not rely on Layer 7 payload information. The goal is to extract only those meshes from conventional flows where long-term periodic data is being exchanged between an external server and multiple internal clients. Flow data is passed through a series of filters that reduce the memory requirements needed for final candidate me...

1. OVERVIEW Since its inception, the Internet has been a hotbed of several successful communications channels, starting off with e-mail, IRC and newsgroups and more recently adding web annotation, instant messaging (IM), and news feeds. Although these channels were developed fairly independently, in many cases their respective functionalities and uses have grown to overlap significantly. For in...

Chatrooms, for example Internet Relay Chat, are generally multi-user, multi-channel and multi-server chat-systems, which run over the Internet and provide a protocol for real-time text-based conferencing between users all over the world. While a well-trained human observer is able to understand who is chatting with whom, there are no efficient and accurate automated tools to determine the group...

Modalities of communication for human beings are gradually increasing in number with the advent of new forms of technology. Many human beings can readily transition between these different forms of communication with little or no effort, which brings about the question: How similar are these different communication modalities? To understand technology’s influence on English communication, four ...

The purpose of this research was to advance the understanding of the behavior of small groups in online chat rooms. The research was conducted using Internet chat data collected through planned exercises with recruited participants. Analysis of the collected data led to construction of preliminary models of social behavior in online discourse. Some of these models, e.g., how to effectively chan...

Email and chat still constitute the majority of electronic communication on the Internet. The standardisation and acceptance of protocols such as SMTP, IMAP, POP3, XMPP, and IRC has allowed to deploy servers for email and chat in a decentralised and interoperable fashion. These protocols can be secured by providing encryption with TLS—directly or via the STARTTLS extension. X.509 PKIs and ad ho...

For the last two decades, computers have entered people’s lives in an unprecedented manner in a way that almost everybody considers life without them rather impossible. In recent years, researchers and educators have been trying to discover how computers and the Internet technology can maximize the quality of language instruction. As such, the present experimental study sought to investigate th...

We evaluate several popular models of local discourse coherence for domain and task generality by applying them to chat disentanglement. Using experiments on synthetic multiparty conversations, we show that most models transfer well from text to dialogue. Coherence models improve results overall when good parses and topic models are available, and on a constrained task for real chat data. One p...