Information sharing through rational links and viewpoint retrieval Bicheng Liu, David J. Harper, and Stuart Watt   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Posters Abstract In this paper we present the concept of Federated Information Sharing Communities (FISC), which leverages organisational and social relationships with document content to provide community-centred information sharing and communication environments. Prominence is given to capabilities that go beyond the generic retrieval of documents to include the ability to retrieve people, their interests and inter-relationships. We focus on providing social awareness "in the large" to help users understand the members within community and the relationships between them. Within the FISC framework, we provide viewpoint retrieval to enable a user to construct member-specific view(s) of the community, based on their various topic interests. As proof of concept, we present the first FISC prototype based on the twenty-five year SIGIR collection and examples of operational results. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery