Agent-Based Knowledge Communities

International audienceVirtual communities are becoming increasingly popular, particularly on the internet, as a means for like-minded individuals to pursue common goals. It is a way to access and to share knowledge and information among participants of such communities without physical or hardware constraints. The concept of a community of interest can be sup- ported in a virtual community in order to bring the appropriate parties together and to share their knowledge with each other. The objective of our work is to investigate a community abstraction approach to agent based knowledge management. We propose a general model that extends the abstraction of an agent, such that it becomes an actor within a knowledge community. In our bottom-up model, agents themselves, software or human, are the members of the virtual knowledge sharing com- munities. Agents can choose to join, leave, create and destroy communities, and can be member of many communities simultaneously. A prototype design illustrates this approach