A visualization system for making choice of electronic bulletin board system

Abstract To post questions or opinions to an electronic bulletin board system on the Internet, it is important for a contributor to find the most appropriate electronic bulletin board system. Posting a contribution to an irrelevant electronic bulletin board system may cause such problems as “no accurate answer arrives” or “follow‐up contributions cannot be easily attached.” However, since the Internet contains massive electronic bulletin board systems that include enormous numbers of diverse kinds of articles, it is extremely difficult to find the most appropriate electronic bulletin board system. Therefore, the aim of this research is to construct a system that extracts and visualizes information related to articles that are posted to an electronic bulletin board system and information related to contributors so that a user can easily and intuitively solve this kind of problem. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 34(10): 36–46, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/scj.10408