Towards Trust-Based Knowledge Management for Mobile Communities

Agent-Mediated Knowledge Management

Volume

Papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Agent-mediated Knowledge Management is a promising approach to handle and maintain knowledge, especially in a distributed and mobile environment. A natural example for such an environment is a community: individuals that group together because they share the same interests. Trust is an important issue when building communities on sharing knowledge. This paper presents our conceptual framework for trustbased knowledge management with respect to the highly distributed and mobile environment of communities. We extend an existing knowledge management system by using mobile agents that serve as dynamic delegates of the mobile user in different locations. These agents may exchange knowledge with other agents. When the user returns to a location a previously delegated agent resides, this agent reconciles the newly found knowledge with the user’s knowledge base. Similar to sharing knowledge, trust plays a central role in this process since it controls the autonomous knowledge acquisition of a user’s agents.