Active Groups — knowledge sharing and management for email discussion groups

Many organizations use email discussion groups to bring their staff together to share problems and expertise. But mail software is limited in helping people find relevant messages. The Active Groups software uses the concept of genre to overcome these problems. Genres are common document forms that emerge through collaboration, and they usually have immediately recognisable forms that help shape the interpretation of their content. Careful analysis of email genres enables the software to focus on the main points of the messages, improving the effectiveness of the search, and using the genre to determine the intent behind each message. Active Groups builds on earlier successful research projects: The Virtual Participant funded by EPSRC and BT and Uncle Derek funded by BP. It is being used by BP to scan large email and document archives, and automatically link them into a web-browsable archive that can be used by communities of BP engineers worldwide, to help them identify and address well engineering problems.    [More] Partners BP Research Team Stuart Watt (PI) Related Projects SmartWeb — a centre of excellence for intelligent Web technologies iSee — supporting e-book comprehesion AmbieSense — ambient, personalised, and context-sensitive information systems for mobile users Personal Email Trainer (PET)

Publications

Watt, S. N. K. (In Press). Text categorisation and genre in information retrieval. Information retrieval: Searching in the 21st Century.

Clark, M., Watt, S. (2007). Classifying XML Documents by Using Genre Features, 4th International Workshop on Text-based Information Retrieval in association with DEXA 2007.

Malins, J., Watt, S., Liapis, A., & McKillop, C. (2007) Tools and Technology to Support Creativity in Virtual Teams. Chapter XI in Higher Creativity for Virtual Teams: Developing Platforms for Co-Creation, pages 224-245. IGI Global. ISBN 978-1-59904-129-2

Liu, B., Harper, D. J. and Watt, S. N. K. (2005). Information sharing through rational links and viewpoint retrieval. SIGIR 2005: pp.639-640

Mulholland, P., & Watt, S. (2004). Cognitive modelling and cognitive architectures. In N. B. A. A. Gellatly (Ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford (ISSN/ISBN: 0-19-927376-6 )

Watt, S. (2004). Context in Active Groups. (speaker). SIGIR 2004 workshop on Information Retrieval in Context, on July 2004.

Moreale, E., & Watt, S. N. K. (2003). An Agent-Based Approach to Mailing List Knowledge Management. Agent Mediated Knowledge Management, International Symposium AMKM 2003

Watt, S. (2003). Search::FreeText

Moreale, E., & Watt, S. N. K. (2002). Organisational information management and knowledge discovery in email within mailing lists. 3rd International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL'02, on 12-14 August, 2002.

Collins, T. D., Mulholland, P., & Watt, S. N. K. (2001). Using genre to support active participation in learning communities. European Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (Euro-CSCL'2001), Maastricht, The Netherlands

Masterton, S. J., & Watt, S. N. K. (2000). Oracles, bards, and village gossips, or, social roles and meta knowledge management. In Journal of Information Systems Frontiers, Vol 2(3/4)