Multi Agent Based Virtual Knowledge Communities for Distributed Knowledge Management

Virtual communities are becoming increasingly popular, particularly on the internet, as a means for like-minded individuals to meet, share and gain access to the information they are most interested in quickly and efficiently, from other individuals they can learn to trust. The concept of a community of practice or a community of interest can be supported in a virtual community in order to bring the appropriate parties together, to share their knowledge with each other. We propose a general model that extends the abstraction of an agent, such that it becomes an actor within a knowledge community. In our 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 Jade-based prototype design illustrates our approach.