The architecture of commKnowledge: combining link structure and user actions to support an online community

The commKnowledge project is exploring how an electronic community interested in electronic business can effectively share information. We discuss the design decisions in developing an architecture that helps automatically vet contributed items and allows access by recency, topicality, and perceived usefulness. We discuss how use graphs combine the hypertextual structure of the web with user judgments and actions to provide new means of assessing the usefulness of contributed information.