Computer-aided communications by visualizing thought space structure

There has been an increase in collaborative work among specialists from multiple disciplines in recent years. Accordingly, building methods and tools to facilitate communications in those collaborative projects has become an essential issue. This paper describes a method that helps people working cooperatively to form new concepts in areas such as science and engineering. The proposed method supports personal or group concept formation by visualizing the relationships between concepts and their microcontents, given by users, in a metric space. Showing individual spaces presented by communication support system (a tool implemented using this method) to individual users and merging them are useful in clarifying personal backgrounds and viewpoints.