A Group Catalog Mechanism for Promoting Knowledge Sharing in Open Virtual Communities

In open virtual communities, thematic groups promote mutual cooperation among their members in order to reach specific targets. To this purpose, users share portions of their knowledge in a reciprocal understandable manner. For this aim, personal software agents are able to assist users by encoding personal information about preferences and goals into suitable profiles. In this work we present a multi-agent solution to manage knowledge shared by users across a number of common thematic groups. A common catalog is created for each thematic group of interest that, in turn, is associated with a group agent. The group agent is devoted to support the group by interacting with personal agents in order to manage the group affiliation process and enrich the common thematic catalog of its own group. In presence of heterogeneous agents, such a common group catalog is a key element to provide knowledge sharing and agent interoperability with both other personal and the group agents. In the proposed approach each user agent is able to personalize its own catalog and contribute to enrich that of its own group by collaborating with its group agent. Keywords—Open Virtual Communities, Knowledge Sharing, Common Thematic Catalog, Intelligent Agents, Thematic Groups.