Social Summarization for Semantic Society

We propose the concept of social summarization as a new technology for semantic computing. Social summarization focuses on human evaluative acts toward information, and provides an alternative to the content-based methods employed in the conventional information summarization technologies. We describe the idea of social summarization and its implementation in the community system TelMeA2003, which is being developed to investigate its effectiveness in supporting collaborative activities in online communities. We also report on the preliminary analysis of TelMeA2003 based on our experience obtained in a distance learning community e-Kyositu.