Examples of Uses (continued)

· Distributing news and rumors to traders in financial institutions

o Fetching of useful news articles is difficult because articles are received with little structure

o This can be fixed through natural language processing or manual human editing

o Facilitates the spread of “word-of-mouth” communication

· Sharing “lore” about repair problems in field service groups

o Computer conferencing system

o “Inquiry networks”

§ People send messages with a general statement to “Anyone”

§ A number of people will elect to receive these messages

§ If they do not know how to answer the question, they will be able to refer the sender to the proper expert