Shine: a Cyber-community Application Platform

We are developing an environment in a cyber-society that will support people in the cyber-society to communicate with members in communities, and to form, maintain, and evolve communities. This paper proposes a common platform that provides the foundation for the various applications to be used in this environment. The platform, named Shine, is designed as a multi-agent architecture. We will discuss requirements of the design such as the organization of modules, communication protocols for agents, and user modeling. 1 The necessity of socialware and its platform As public communication networks such as the Internet continue to grow, societies outside of real society, i.e., cyber-societies, are going to continue to appear on the networks. A cyber-society has the advantage of providing communication capabilities to real society that are free from geographical or temporal constraints. Because people are unable to deal with too much information or too many other humans, however, they will tend to lose proper perspective for acting or will hesitate to act and end up isolated in such a society. In real society, although we only meet others in a physically limited sense, all of us are successful in creating communities of various people. In a community, both people with common interests and goals, and similar knowledge, and people with di ering interests and goals, and di erent levels of knowledge, exist. We can enjoy conversations with those sharing our interests and collaborate with those sharing our goals. Moreover, we can deepen our knowledge in discussions with those having di erent opinions. In this way, we can actively communicate within relatively small but satisfactorily heterogeneous groups. Moreover, community feelings develop from such continual communications, and these community feelings help further smooth the communications that takes place. Communities in a cyber-society must also develop in a similar way for improved communications. Actually, some active communities already exist in cyber-societies. At present, however, many people are worried about the overabundance or the lack of information and people, and so it is di cult to form and maintain communities. To overcome this di culty, a new communication environment is needed that can provide an appropriate range of activities for In Short Papers Proceedings PRIMA’99. {31{