Sharing Culture - Enabling technologies for Communication Support

In cyberworlds as well as in real world environments there is a need to enable cooperation and communication. While IT support has enabled us to overcome the barriers of time and place in communication over distance, there is still the problem of bridging the gap across different cultures. In this paper we will study the possibility of IT support for "sharing culture", i.e. for communication across different cultures. Our attempt to realize this goal is the creation of a learning, proactive agent that keeps track of the communication in virtual environments. We try to support the communication partners during their interactions by providing information based on the type and content of the communication. The information provided by the agent is based on cultural differences that could lead to potential misunderstandings within a communication scenario. The idea is to design a pluggable agent to support crosscultural communication for virtual communities in distributed environments.