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A user-interactive question-answering (QA) platform named BuyAns (at www. buyans.com) is presented. The platform is a special kind of online community and mainly features a rewarding scheme for answering questions among all users, a pattern-based user interface (UI) for questioning and answering, and a pattern-based representation and storage scheme for accumulated question-answer pairs. The system actually proposes and promotes a C2C business model for exchanging and commercializing knowledge from ordinary people. It can also be used as an incentive and collaborative approach to knowledge acquisition. Driven by the business model, prompt and quality answers are quickly accumulated. Due to the patterns used, accurate answers can be provided automatically for repeated questions. Facilitating features and technologies, including user modeling, reputation management, and answer clustering and fusion, are also developed and briefly described. Preliminary user studies show the potential attraction of the system to its users as well as reasonable usability and user-satisfaction. We anticipate hot applications of such a system in the Web 2.0 era.Keywords question answering . user-interactive QA system . C2C business model . knowledge acquisition . web community . web 2.0

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