Agent and multi-agent applications to support distributed communities of practice: a short review

This paper concerns the relationship between agents or multi-agent systems and distributed communities of practice. It presents a review of a number of agent and multi-agent applications with features that could contribute to supporting distributed communities of practice. The association is promising because of features like autonomy, pro-activity, flexibility or ability to integrate systems that characterize agents and multi-agent systems. Furthermore, such an association is a step towards building mixed communities of humans and artificial agents. To understand how agents and multi-agent systems could answer some of the needs of distributed communities of practice, we organize the analyzed applications into five different categories defined by considering the main activities of a community, namely: Individual Participation, Synchronous Interactions, Asynchronous Interactions, Publishing and Community Cultivation. Such a classification helps us identify the relevant features of the current technology and determine some that should be further developed, e.g. to support community coordination or gather information related to virtual communities. For each application we selected, we present its main approach and point out its potential interest.