Agent-Oriented Approach to Develop Context-Aware Applications: A Case Study on Communities of Practice

This paper presents and discusses the use of an agent-oriented context-aware platform to support the interactions of the participating actors of communities of practice in the health care domain. Our work is based on a scenario where communities of practice are applied in a hospital to enhance the knowledge sharing among the hospital staff members who share interests and goals. An agent-oriented modeling language (AORML) is used to support the analysis of contextual information and interaction between participating actors in the context-aware services platform. The chosen supporting platform is a context-aware services platform that uses semantic web services and runs on top of 3G networks