Knowledge Acquisition Processes in Internet Communities

With the growth of usage of List Severs and the World Wide Web the Internet has become a major resource for the acquisition of knowledge, and it has given new prominence to human discourse as a continuing source of knowledge. The society of distributed intelligent agents that is the Internet community at large provides an ‘expert system’ with a scope and scale well beyond that yet conceivable with computer-based systems alone. It is important to model and support the processes by which knowledge is acquired through the net. In developing new support tools is one asks “what is the starting point for the person seeking information, the existing information that is the basis for their search.” A support tool is then one that takes that existing information and uses it to present further information that is likely to be relevant. Such information may include relevant concepts, text, existing documents, people, sites, list servers, news groups, and so on. The support system may provide links to further examples of all of these based on content, categorization or linguistic or logical inference. The outcome of the search may be access to a document but it may also be email to a person, a list or a news group. This articles develops a model of services and knowledge processes on the Internet, describes various forms of support tool, and categorizes them in terms of the model.