Towards Agent-Mediated Knowledge Management

In this paper, we outline the relation between Knowledge Management (KM) as an application area on the one hand, and software agents as a basic technology for supporting KM on the other. We start by presenting characteristics of KM which account for some drawbacks of today's -- typically centralized -- technological approaches for KM. We argue that the basic features of agents (social ability, autonomy, re- and proactiveness) can alleviate several of these drawbacks. A classification schema for the description of agent-based KM systems is established, and a couple of example systems are depicted in terms of this schema. The paper concludes with questions which we think research in Agent-mediated Knowledge Management (AMKM) should deal with