ABSTRACT This paper investigates the feasibility of maintaining a social information system to support attendees at an academic conference. The main challenge of this work was to create an infrastructure where users’ social activities, such as bookmarking, tagging, and social linking could be used to enhance user navigation and maximize the users’ ability to locate two important types of information in conference settings: presentations to attend and attendees to meet. We developed Conference Navigator 3, a social conference support system that integrates a conference schedule planner with a social linking service. We examined its potential and functions in the context of a medium-scale academic conference. In this paper, we present the design of the system’s socially enabled features and report the results of a conference-based study. Our study demonstrates the feasibility of social information systems for supporting academic conferences. Despite the low number of potential users and the short timeframe in which conferences took place, the usage of the system was high enough to provide sufficient data for social mechanisms. The study shows that most critical social features were highly appreciated and used, and provides direction for further research.

中文翻译：

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在学术会议的社会系统中连接信息和人

摘要 本文调查了维护社会信息系统以支持学术会议与会者的可行性。这项工作的主要挑战是创建一个基础设施，用户的社交活动（例如书签、标记和社交链接）可用于增强用户导航并最大限度地提高用户在会议设置中定位两种重要信息的能力：出席的演讲和参加者见面。我们开发了 Conference Navigator 3，这是一个社交会议支持系统，将会议日程安排器与社交链接服务集成在一起。我们在一个中等规模的学术会议的背景下研究了它的潜力和功能。在本文中，我们介绍了系统社交功能的设计，并报告了基于会议的研究结果。我们的研究证明了社会信息系统支持学术会议的可行性。尽管潜在用户数量少且会议召开时间短，但该系统的使用率足以为社交机制提供足够的数据。该研究表明，大多数关键社会特征都得到了高度赞赏和使用，并为进一步研究提供了方向。