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Toward collective intelligence of online communities: A primitive conceptual model

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Abstract

Inspired by the ideas of Swarm Intelligence and the “global brain”, a concept of “community intelligence” is suggested in the present paper, reflecting that some “intelligent” features may emerge in a Web-mediated online community from interactions and knowledge-transmissions between the community members. This possible research field of community intelligence is then examined under the backgrounds of “community” and “intelligence” researches. Furthermore, a conceptual model of community intelligence is developed from two views. From the structural view, the community intelligent system is modeled as a knowledge supernetwork that is comprised of triple interwoven networks of the media network, the human network, and the knowledge network. Furthermore, based on a dyad of knowledge in two forms of “knowing” and “knoware”, the dynamic view describes the basic mechanics of the formation and evolution of “community intelligence”. A few relevant research issues are shortly discussed on the basis of the proposed conceptual model.

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Correspondence to Haoxiang Xia.

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This work is supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants No. 70431001, No. 70620140115, and No. 70871016, respectively. H. Xia would also appreciate the financial support from Chinese Scholarship Council to conduct this international collaboration. Part of the paper was presented in the conference of IEEE SMC 2008.

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Luo, S., Xia, H., Yoshida, T. et al. Toward collective intelligence of online communities: A primitive conceptual model. J. Syst. Sci. Syst. Eng. 18, 203–221 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-009-5095-0

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