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Bulletin, August/September 2009


What’s New? 

Selected Abstracts from JASIST

Authors who choose to do so prepare and submit these summaries to the editor of the Bulletin.

From JASIST v. 60 (5) 
Li, J., Zhang, P., & Cao, J. (2009). External concept support for group support systems through Web mining (1057-1070). 

Study and Results: In this study, we propose an approach to build a concept space from the web to provide external concept support for GSS users. We investigate if the concept space contains qualified concepts to stimulate divergent thinking and if providing external concept support can improve group effectiveness and efficiency. The experiment results indicate that the concept space mined from the web contained qualified concepts to stimulate divergent thinking and that external concept support in GSS greatly enhanced group productivity for idea generation tasks.

What’s New? Applying web-mining algorithms to GDSS is our contribution to the GDSS literature. We empirically proved in the experiment setting that providing external concepts mined from the web can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the idea generation task.

Limitations: Providing external concept to discussion groups may restrict users’ thoughts. This study was conducted in a Chinese environment, and thus the methodology and results may not be directly applicable to GSS in English or other languages.