Profiling and Matchmaking Strategies in Support of Opportunistic Collaboration

With the recent advances in communications technologies and decentralization of work practices, there has been an increase in distributed, remote, computerized work environments. In most systems, individuals work from their personal computer terminals, unaware of their peers. With the change from a physical to a virtual environment, opportunities for collaboration often go unnoticed. In this paper, we focus on how to bring unplanned collaboration about. We present an agent framework to encourage and support unplanned cooperation between people. Agents build user profiles through analysis of their documents and work environment and match them according to their interests, activities and opportunities for collaboration. By matching users’ work contexts, needs and resources, we expect to uncover opportunities for collaboration that might otherwise go unnoticed. Resource sharing is facilitated in the hopes of stimulating collaboration between users.