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Towards communityware

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Abstract

This paper summarizes our recent activities to support people to communicate with each other using public computer network systems. Unlike conventional teleconferencing systems, which are mainly for business meetings, we focus on informal communication in open orgnizations. So far, three different systems have been developed and actually tested.

  • • InSocia, we introduced vision agents which act on behalf of their users in a network. To enable a meeting to be scheduled at a mutually acceptable time, we proposed the scheme called non-committed scheduling.

  • •Free Walk supports casual meetings among more than a few people. For this purpose, we provide a 3-D virtual space calledcommunity common where participants can behave just as in real life.

  • • In theICMAS’96 Mobile Assistant Project, on the other hand, we conducted an experiment in an actual international conference using 100 personal digital assistants and wireless phones. Various services were provided to increase the interactions among participants of the conference.

Based on these experiences, we are now moving towardscommunity-ware to support people to form a community based on computer network technologies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, 606, Kyoto, Japan

    Toru Ishida

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  1. Toru Ishida
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Toru Ishida, Dr. Eng.: He received the B. E., M. Eng. and D. Eng. degrees from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1976, 1978 and 1989, respectively. He is currently a professor of Department of Information Science, Kyoto University. He has been working on “Parallel, Distributed and Multiagent Production Systems (Springer, 1994)” from 1983. He first proposed parallel rule firing, and extended it to distributed rule firing. Organizational self-design was then introduced into distributed production systems for increasing adaptiveness. From 1990, he started working on “Real-time Search for Learning Autonomous Agents (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997).” Again, organizational adaptation becomes a central issue in controlling multiple problem solving agents. He recently initiated the study of “Communityware: Towards Global Collaboration (John Wiley and Sons, 1998)” with his colleagues.

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Ishida, T. Towards communityware. NGCO 16, 5–21 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037318

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037318

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