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 brin...

The Common Component Architecture (CCA) defines a specification for the implementation of frameworks to support component-based high performance applications. The same framework specification is intended to describe different implementations for different environments, ranging from sequential processes to parallel processors to wide area distributed systems or Grids. The mapping of the CCA spec...

Designing a general algorithm for interest matching is a major challenge in building online community and agent-based communication networks. This paper presents an information theoretic concept-matching approach to measure degrees of similarity among users. Kullback-Leiber distance is used as a measure of similarity on users represented by concept hierarchy. Preliminary sensitivity analysis sh...

We present a theory of unsecured consumer debt that does not rely on utility costs of default or on enforcement mechanisms that arise in repeated-interaction settings. The theory is based on private information about a person’s type and on a person’s incentive to signal his type to entities other than creditors. Specifically, debtors signal their low-risk status to insurers by avoiding default ...

The spreading of memes on the web played an important role in the emergence of Internet communities. The principal purpose of the study is to implement a simulation model to analyze the process of emergence of Internet communities. The model shows the importance of factors such as the interactions between online agents as well as their propensity to adopt and remember new memes. In addition, it...

The global effort toward sustainable development has initiated a transition in water management. Water utility companies use water-pricing policies as an instrument for controlling residential water demand. To support policy makers in their decisions, the authors have developed DAWN, a hybrid model for evaluating water-pricing policies. DAWN integrates an agent-based social model for the consum...

Recent years have witnessed an increase in the use of community based participatory research (CBPR) tools for understanding environment and health issues and facilitating social action. This paper explores the application and utility of photovoice for understanding water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) behaviours and catalysing community led solutions to change behaviours. Between June and Augu...

Reputation mechanisms are being used to increase the reliability and performance of virtual societies. Different decentralized reputation models have been proposed based on interactions among agents. Each system agent evaluates and stores the reputations of the agents with whom they have interacted and can also testify to other agents about such reputations. The main disadvantages of such appro...

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The information society has reached a new era of communication and knowledge management. Virtual communities are emerging as a requirement in this new information distribution scheme. We investigate the concept of virtual knowledge communities using an agent-based abstraction. In this field, there is a need for evaluating the performances and the quality of a global system resulting from the be...