Agent-Based Interaction Management for Document-Centered Collaboration in a Digital Library

Collaborative processes can be knowledge and information intensive, especially in research-oriented environments. In the Humanities, the access to resources in a digital library is often combined with collaborative interpretation of the documents. This may involve cooperative negotiations between users, careful evaluation of available options, or discussions about the interpretation of certain information items. These collaborative activities are only inadequately supported by contemporary workflow management and groupware systems. Often, the structure of those processes can only be weakly specified in that each person involved might take situative actions in her/his own individual way. Within the COLLATE project (see www.collate.de), we have applied agent-based interaction management in order to encourage scientific discussions between film experts about the interpretation of historical documents. Dedicated collaboration agents act in the background to serve as intelligent interaction managers and mediate between the users and their discourse context.