document: Standing on the shoulders of ants : stigmergy in the web Stigmergy is a biological term used when discussing insect or swarm behavior , and describes a model supporting environmental communication separately from artefacts or agents . This phenomenon is demonstrated in the behavior of ants and their food gathering process when following pheromone trails , or similarly termites and their termite mound building process . What is interesting with this mechanism is that highly organized societies are achieved without an apparent management structure . Stigmergic behavior is implicit in the Web where the volume of users provides a self-organizing and self-contextualization of content in sites which facilitate collaboration . However , the majority of content is generated by a minority of the Web participants . A significant contribution from this research would be to create a model of Web stigmergy , identifying virtual pheromones and their importance in the collaborative process . This paper explores how exploiting stigmergy has the potential of providing a valuable mechanism for identifying and analyzing online user behavior recording actionable knowledge otherwise lost in the existing web interaction dynamics . Ultimately this might assist our building better collaborative Web sites .
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