Peer-to-peer and multi-agent systems technologies for knowledge management applications. An agent-oriented analysis

This paper focuses on a framework for developing knowledge management (KM) applications that integrates peer-to-peer (P2P) and multi-agent systems (MAS) technologies. The objective of this framework is to support a particular KM paradigm that emphasizes aspects such as autonomy and distributedness of knowledge sources. In particular, we present a characterization of peer-to-peer in terms of a general architectural pattern and a set of guidelines for designing peer-to-peer applications according to the proposed framework. We adopt an agent-oriented approach that extends Tropos, a software engineering methodology introduced in earlier paper