Roles and Agents in Pervasive Communities

With rapid developments in mobile and pervasive computing and wireless networking, we will virtually become more connected than ever, providing an opportunity to continually and concurrently engage in (whether for several seconds or years at a time) and move among electronic communities. The mobile and pervasive devices become doorways to these pervasive communities. This position paper discusses a high-level model of mobile applications which we call open agent-enhanced mobile virtual communities (AMV-communities) based on the concept of roles and role models. AMV-communities are open because participants (humans, software agents, or combinations thereof) might leave or join (without specific a priori preparations) the community during the community’s lifetime. AMV-communities are mobile in that its participants can be mobile. We show how fulfilment of roles by participants is implemented by interactions between participants and agents which we call roleproxies. Role-proxies can provide proactive services to participants and enable community-wide adaptations.