Actors-media-qualities: a Generic Model for Information Retrieval in Virtual Communities

The article presents a model of the structural properties of virtual communities and the information they can access. It argues that a large part of the information – and actually knowledge – present in virtual communities can be identified by a graph structure that consists of three node types – actors, media and qualities – as well as the relations that connect them. Based on these relations, information retrieval and other inference mechanisms can be mapped into the model.