Application and Analysis of Interpersonal Networks for a Community System

In this paper, we discuss importance and usefulness of interpersonal network in a community support system based on an analysis of our scheduling support system employed in an academic conference. Our system supports information exchange among participants and information discovery thereof. It generates participant's interpersonal networks and thereby provides information sharing control. This system was used in an academic conference JSAI2003 involving 276 active users and generating their interpersonal networks. An analysis of these networks reveals that interpersonal networks can promote information exchange among people by indicating existence of people to the others, and that interpersonal networks can support information discovery by its recommendation functionality.