A context based approach to acquisition and utilization of personal knowledge for WWW browsing

This paper proposes a method for acquiring and utilizing our personal knowledge in computer systems. We developed a system called MindHeap that helps us to acquire personal knowledge by browsing WWW (World Wide Web) hypertexts. Our approach for acquiring a user´s personal knowledge is to use situational context which has important effects for acquiring and reminding knowledge. Situational context means information which characterizes her/his situation of information activities. MindHeap can help the user to organize knowledge on WWW pages by finding and recording related words as situational context for topics specified by the user. The system extracts a list of related words as situational context, and records it with the topics. Thus, topics and their contexts are accumulated, then they can work as knowledge for the user, e.g., she/he can retrieve pages of which situation is similar to the current page