Yenta is still under active development, but this particular page is not. If you're interested in current research papers about Yenta, or obtaining a copy of Yenta, please start here instead. This page is one of many that were written in late 1994 and early 1995, and are being preserved here for historical purposes. If you're viewing this page, you probably found it via an old link or are interested in the history of how Yenta came to be. These pages have not been actively maintained since 1995, so you'll find all sorts of older descriptions which may not match the current system, citations to old papers and old results, and so forth. |
Coalitions may be somewhat different in intent from the above groupings, however. Like users with similar interests, a coalition puts great emphasis on serendipity, since users may not even know there are any other users out there who might be members of a coalition.
For example, one great source of serendipity involves people who know each other, but do not know everything about each other. In companies, this is often manifest as the problem of two people working a few doors away from each other who are working on similar problems (perhaps as subproblems of their larger work), but don't know that they share an interest. This leads to needless duplication of work. Similarly, doctors looking at different patients whose symptoms are similar may never know that they are looking at a larger cluster unless the doctors involved are brought together somehow.
Lenny Foner Last modified: Wed Dec 7 20:51:49 1994