A proposal of a multi-agent supporting system for network community formation

Abstract

Information-oriented network society is advancing far beyond our speculation based on the rapid innovations of information and network technologies. Large amount of people become suffering from so-called information barrier When we consider people with informational handicaps, a large gap is opening up between those who can use computers effectively to process information and those who cannot. People interact in the network society through network communities and one of the major issues in the network society is how to bring people together, that is how to form the communities that share similar interests. Active usage of information with the help of personal agents that interact with each other, gather information, and assist the user seems inevitable. Although, users interact through explicit communities, it is more natural and with fewer barriers to form communities as implicit communities using user's profiles and then to introduce users to explicit communities. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent supporting system for implicit community formation and discuss methods to encourage effective information exchanges between community members and to improve the quality of their lives.