Abstract:
The Internet or the web provides new interesting and promising opportunities
and features for people to meet and communicate in virtual environments.
Today the Internet is not only for locating and retrieving texts and
documents, virtual communities on specific or general topics emerge
continuously to support communication between people and serve as meeting
places. Chat rooms are often used to support this meeting and communication.
However, filtering large amounts of information from these chat rooms
is not
a trivial task and moreover being present in chat rooms at all times
is
utopia and quite impossible.
This paper addresses a framework for a multiagent-supported community chat
room. The agent framework supports users in identifying, retrieving, and
filtering for them relevant and interesting information and conversations by
monitoring the activity of one or more chat rooms. Users are able to
communicate with an agent and delegate specific operations or tasks to the
agent, e.g. monitor when certain users enter a room. Also, the solution
supports that an agent is able to observe the actions of the user and
recommend chat rooms or specific conversations in chat rooms based on its
understanding of the user. The agent operates and makes decisions on a user
profile which is updated dynamically and which indicates the interests of
the user. The agent is also able to communicate with other agents in order
to make the most useful recommendations to its user. The framework includes
an overall architecture of the involved agents and sketches for the
interaction between the agents and the users.