With the constant increase in the amount of information available in online communities, the task of building an appropriate Recommender System to support the user in her decision making process is becoming more and more challenging. In addition to the classical collaborative filtering and content based approaches, taking into account ratings, preferences and demographic characteristics of the ...

Prior research establishes useful theory on knowledge flow, knowledge complexity, and collaboration in organizations. However, blogs, wikis, and discussion forums support collaboration and knowledge flow in a new realm, distributed work settings, where participants rarely if ever enjoy face-toface contact. This research will investigate the unique features of online communities that facilitate ...

With the constantly growing ecosphere of online communities, their managers, operators and members can hugely benefit from a rich set of tools to successfully understand, control, exploit and utilise them. This requires to extract reusable, interpretable analytics in real time from the streams of dynamically, socially produced data. In this article, we summarise our efforts in the context of th...

Researchers and theorists have proposed that feelings of attachment to subgroups within a larger online community or site can increase users’ loyalty to the site. They have identified two types of attachment, with distinct causes and consequences. With bond-based attachment, people feel connections to other group members, while with identitybased attachment they feel connections to the group as...

Increasing numbers of patients are using online communities to seek support by posting personal stories and requesting information. To leverage this trend, we investigated Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for extracting users’ health interests from online communities. We identified relevant semantic types of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) for online communities. The results s...

Despite the optimism surrounding the business value of online communities (OCs), our knowledge of how OCs can be leveraged strategically to enhance the performance of the sponsoring organization is limited. To address this lack of knowledge, a theoretical lens is constructed by distilling the essence of strategic management literature into three logics of strategy that prescribe different means...

With the rapid growth of social networks and the increased rate of adoption by patients, healthcare organizations are progressively adopting online community-based initiatives to conduct healthcare activities. Considering the enormous potential online communities hold, for practitioners to get closer to their patients, online communities could be effectively utilized to conduct health managemen...

Online communities such as question and answer (QA) systems are growing rapidly and we increasingly rely on them for valuable information and entertainment. However, finding meaningful rewards to motivate participation from the most qualified users, or experts, presents researchers with two main challenges: identifying these users and (2) rewarding their participation. Using an interdisciplinar...

The advent of Web technology has enabled new ways in which groups of people may interact, leading to the development of online communities. In an academic environment these virtual communities can facilitate collaboration and provide new ways for educators to communicate and disseminate their ideas and practices. A website designed to support a community of educators interested in scholarship a...

O communities (OCs) are a virtual organizational form in which knowledge collaboration can occur in unparalleled scale and scope, in ways not heretofore theorized. For example, collaboration can occur among people not known to each other, who share different interests and without dialogue. An exploration of this organizational form can fundamentally change how we theorize about knowledge collab...