Abstract: A system and method for communication and collaboration that uses a generalized annotation based mechanism such that items can be shared amongst users and both items and users can be searched and ranked based on existing Information Retrieval ranking techniques. A new method is introduced for clustering users and items simultaneously on the basis of category contexts. These mechanisms are leveraged to create a mechanism that allows for publishing and subscribing items based on context.

Abstract: Disclosed is a semantic user interface system that allows text information to be tagged with machine-readable IDs that are associated with concepts for conveying information without any ambiguity or without being hampered by the limitations of human languages. Typically, a plurality of vocabularies are stored across a network, and each vocabulary includes a plurality of machine-readable IDs each corresponding to a concept and at least one keyword corresponding to each machine-readable ID. An input interface accepts text information, selects those machine-readable IDs whose keywords match up with the text information, and returns a list of candidates each corresponding to one of the selected machine-readable IDs and including a corresponding description. The machine-readable IDs can carry information in the form of concepts without any ambiguity as opposed to text information.