Agent-Based Knowledge Communities

Virtual 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 supported 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 communities. Agents can choose to join, leave, create and destroy communities, and can be member of many communities simultaneously. A prototype design illustrates this approach.