Product developers frequently discuss topics related to their development project with others, but often use technical terms whose meanings are not clear to non-specialists. To provide non-experts with precise and comprehensive understanding of the know-who/know-how being discussed, the method proposed herein categorizes the messages using a taxonomy of the products being developed and a taxonomy of tasks relevant to those products. The instances in the taxonomy are products and/or tasks manually selected as relevant to system development. The concepts are defined by the taxonomy of instances. That proposed method first extracts phrases from discussion logs as data-driven instances relevant to system development. It then classifies those phrases to the concepts defined by taxonomy experts. The innovative feature of our method is that in classifying a phrase to a concept, say C, the method considers the associations of the phrase with not only the instances of C, but also with the instances of the neighbor concepts of C (neighbor is defined by the taxonomy). This approach is quite accurate in classifying phrases to concepts; the phrase is classified to C, not the neighbors of C, even though they are quite similar to C. Next, we attach a data-driven concept to C; the data-driven concept includes instances in C and a classified phrase as a data-driven instance. We analyze know-who and know-how by using not only human-defined concepts but also those data-driven concepts. We evaluate our method using the mailing-list of an actual project. It could classify phrases with twice the accuracy possible with the TF/iDF method, which does not consider the neighboring concepts. The taxonomy with data-driven concepts provides more detailed know-who/know-how than can be obtained from just the human-defined concepts themselves or from the data-driven concepts as determined by the TF/iDF method.

This paper discusses effective configuration methods for peer-to-peer (P2P) network topologies within a mobile ad-hoc network. With recent progress in mobile ad-hoc network technology promoting the creation of new and attractive services, we are examining and developing P2P network systems for operation within ad-hoc networks. Our focus is on identifying methods of network-topology control that provide the best balance between performance and availability. We evaluate three methods through computer simulation and field trials from the viewpoints of resource consumption and network integrity, and clarify their domains of applicability. The results are expected to contribute to the design of future P2P networks for operation in mobile ad-hoc networks.