ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a system called CoMeMo-Community that supports community knowledge evolution, which uses a talking virtualized egos (TVE) metaphor. The virtualized ego is a software agent that functions as an alterego. It works as a medium for conveying one’s knowledge to others by in teracting with other visualized egos or community members over a network. This interaction among virtualized egos visualizes dynamic knowledge in teraction in a community. We performed an experiment to examine (a) how people generate associative representation from ideas, (b) how community knowledge evolves by people expressing their own and others’ ideas clearly, and (c) how people act in such a knowledge-creating process. The subjects were 45 students who attended a lecture on artificial intelligence at our institute. In this three-week experiment, we observed the following: (a) Collaborative knowledge building. Some subjects created new information based on the information published by other subjects, (b) Change of topic. Although most of the published information was about “Nara” at first, as time passed, the topic changed to “agent” and “computer.” (c) Creation of new human relationships. One participant was able to make friends using this system.
