SONAR: Communication system for supporting information gathering and social interaction in a niche market

We propose a new communication system by which niche people can obtain cross-cutting information and communicate with other people based on each personality. The system graphically displays the degree and direction of other people’s hobbies who are interested in the keyword niche people input, and relation between the knowledge e.g. movies, music, animation, history, geography using nodes. So, we can search friends who have similar interest and direction in hobbies. From the demonstration experiments, we obtained good results that the system could help niche people to gain and exchange useful information. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.