External concept support for group support systems through Web mining

External information plays an important role in group decision-making processes, yet research about external information support for Group Support Systems (GSS) has been lacking. In this study, we propose an approach to build a concept space to provide external concept support for GSS users. Built on a Web mining algorithm, the approach can mine a concept space from the Web and retrieve related concepts from the concept space based on usersʹ comments in a real-time manner. We conduct two experiments to evaluate the quality of the proposed approach and the effectiveness of the external concept support provided by this approach. The experiment results indicate that the concept space mined from the Web contained qualified concepts to stimulate divergent thinking. The results also demonstrate that external concept support in GSS greatly enhanced group productivity for idea generation tasks.