An Email-Based Information Sharing System for Online Communities

Abstract

An email-based information-sharing system, which supports information gathering from outside a corporate organization, is proposed. The objective of this system is to encourage creative PLAN activities by enabling specialists in different communities to contact each other. First, the differences between information, data, and knowledge are described, and information sharing is defined as opposed to data sharing and knowledge sharing. Then, an information base containing primary information and secondary information is described. Information bases are distributed to each of the participants instead of being physically shared. This is done for security reasons peculiar to information sharing where the occurrence, logic, or the retriever's interpretations of information-base retrievals must be hidden from other participants. Thus, logical sharing and physical sharing are separated, whereas in conventional data-sharing systems, or knowledge-sharing systems, they are not. A new method for information-base retrieval, which is characterized by flow-retrieval functionality, is also introduced to enable tracing of interactive processes of email-based discussions.