Ontology-Based Remote Collaboration for the Development of Software System

RAP (Remote Assistant for Programmers) is a Web and multi-agent based system to support remote students and programmers during common projects or activities based on the Java programming language. RAP helps users to solve problems proposing information extracted from dedicated repositories and forwarding answers received from other users, recommended as experts. Its peculiar characteristic is the integration of the agent technology with the semantic Web technology. In fact, in order to improve filtering and recommendation techniques, RAP takes advantage of an ontological approach to user and document profiling. A RAP system is not a closed system, instead it is based on a dynamic network of RAP platforms managing groups of geographically localized users and documents. Therefore, recommendations should take into account of the accessible experts and documents. At this purpose, RAP users and documents profile management subsystems provide a mechanism that dynamically adapts the relevance of each profile. An initial prototype of the RAP System is under development by using JADE.