This paper describes the idea and technology of Decision Support for Internet Users, called DSIU, which is an area of research for providing decision support for Internet users by using information on the Internet. DSIU aims to construct decision support systems that evaluate various items on the Internet from user's preferences and provide recommendation of the items with logical explanations for the recommendation. This paper particularly focuses on knownledge acquisition technology that acquires knowledge for the systems automatically from information on the Internet. Two techniques are proposed to acquire knowledge from texts on the Internet : the first acquires knowledge for evaluating items on the Internet, and the other handles similar-meaning words appearing in the texts together. By using 62 press releases for electrical appliances gathered from the Web, the accuracy of the proposed techniques was confirmed.

Public Opinion Channel (POC) is an automatic broadcasting system for a knowledge-creating community that creates and circulates knowledge. POC provides a worthy test bed to explore an ideal style of knowledge-creating community. The research of POC contributes to the development of agent technologies that enhances interaction in a community. At the beginning of this paper, we introduce a complete system image of POC. At the second, we describe three major functions for POC to facilitate knowledge creation in a community : a) summarization of heterogeneous comments in multiple-text, b) identification of major and minor comments, and c) automatic generation of broadcast scripts. Then, we show the currently implemented prototype system of POC. Finally, we discuss advanced features desirable to improve the system to realize an ideal knowledge-creating community as a future direction of this study.

This paper introduces Robotic Communication Terminals as a mobility support system for elderly and disabled people that assists for their impaired ability of recognition, actuation, and information access. It consists of two types of subsystems. One is the "environment-embedded system, " which is fixed in the real-world, for example, on walkways, in shopping malls, and at stations. The other is the "mobile system, " which accompanies the user. These subsystems communicate with each other, and connect the real-world, computer networks and users to provide comfortable means of promoting mobility and freedom.

The knowledge discovery in business data is extremely important in highly competitive circumstance. However it does not seem that the most companies have made full use of these accumulated data for strategic planning. It is not clear how companies construct actual data mining systems and how they produce profits by using knowledge derived from them. In this paper we have discussed how the data mining system is applied to the data in the real world and pointed out the research problems in the future.