Intelligence and interaction in community-based systems (Part 2)
This is the second part of a special issue dedicated to the area of Intelligence and Interaction in Community-based Systems. The first (Stathis and Purcell, 2002) addressed the range of spontaneous interactions that may form part of a set of overlapping patterns of personal, familial, social and civic circles. The focus then was on the needs of physically co-located communities, those lay people who may live next door, frequent the local pub, send their children to the same school, or bump into each other intermittently at meetings of local societies or professional associations.
This second part of the special issue still keeps the notion of local community in the physical neighbourhood but here the attention is diverted to the kind of relationships that the members of such a community may be establishing with other communities, whether local or global, real or virtual, more simple or more complex. Such relationships can vary enormously in the manner in which interactions can be structured and organised. It is this potential development that orients this part of the special issue towards those more social activities that are, by their nature, quite structured and which involve citizen interactions in more formal settings, such as the buying and selling of goods, learning in a local setting, sharing knowledge at work, and accessing local cultural resources in order to support the needs of a modern community's lifestyle.
As in Part 1, we rely on the availability of various computing devices with user interfaces that possess a level of 'intelligence' which both masks the complexity of that given device and, concomitantly, promotes a facility of use. Although the task of building such intelligent interaction devices requires a substantial amount of technical investment, the methodological stance being adopted in this part of the special issue is nevertheless, that technology is not an end in itself; rather, it is a way of both serving and mediating exchanges between people in their various, more formal and structured interactions as members of a local community.
This part of the special issue starts with the work of Witkowski et al., who investigate the application of software agents to support electronic retailing for local communities. The paper considers issues that arise when each customer can express their likes and dislikes for various aspects of the product range to their software agent, both in terms of the software agent's ability to serve them better, and how such individual preferences may be shared with other customers in the larger community to help those customers in their aim of making better and more informed choices. The investigations reported use an