An intelligent peer-to-peer multi-agent system for collaborative management of bibliographic databases

This paper describes the design of a peer-to-peer system for collaborative management of distributed bibliographical databases. The goal of this system is twofold: firstly, it aims at providing help for users to manage their local bibliographical databases. Secondly, it offers the possibility to exchange bibliographical data among like-minded user groups in an implicit and intelligent manner. Each user is assisted by a personal agent that provides help such as: filling in bibliographical records, verifying the correctness of information entered and more importantly, recommendation of relevant bibliographical references. To do this, the personal agent needs to collaborate with its peers in order to get relevant recommendations. Each agent applies a case-based reasoning approach in order to provide peers with requested recommendations. The paper focuses mainly on describing the recommendation computation approach

Internal Accession Date Only Approved for External Publication 1 People and Computers XVII

peer-to-peer, knowledge workers, information lifecycle, information sharing, web use, information gathering The success of peer-to-peer (p2p) music-sharing has no doubt contributed to assumptions that individuals' PCs are a vast untapped resource of assets just waiting to be unlocked. This includes the push for opening up our file spaces at work to allow peers access to previously inaccessible information. We explore the potential of these ideas and test some of the assumptions underlying them by looking at 16 knowledge workers' file spaces in the context of Web information-gathering tasks. Knowledge workers' file spaces are more like "workbenches" than "archives" and the information held within them is fundamentally different to that which is placed in shared information spaces. Work is carried out on information to make it shareable, yet this information is found side-by-side on the "workbench" with unshareable information. This leads us to question the potential value of enabling people to open up their file spaces without considering the reusability of this information for others. The success of peer-to-peer (p2p) music sharing has no doubt contributed to assumptions that individuals' PCs are a vast untapped resource of assets just waiting to be unlocked by such systems. This includes the push for opening up our file spaces at work to allow peers access to previously inaccessible information with minimum effort. We wished to explore the potential value of these ideas and to test some of the assumptions underlying them, the motivation being that we believed the issues raised by this investigation would be important to those developing p2p information sharing tools. We do this by looking at the flow of information in and out of 16 knowledge workers' file spaces in the context of carrying out Web information gathering tasks at work. In doing this we find that the file spaces used for knowledge work are more like "workbenches" than "archives" and that the information held within them is fundamentally different in content and organisation to that which knowledge workers place in shared information spaces such as the Web. Knowledge workers work on their information to make it shareable to specific audiences yet this information is found side by side on the "workbench" with unshareable information. This leads us to question the potential value of enabling people to open up their file spaces without having regard to the reusability of this information for others