SHARK, a multi-agent system to support document sharing and promote collaboration

This paper describes SHARK, a document-sharing multiagent application providing users with a means to share documents and allowing keyword-based search. SHARK's agents operate transparently-with respect to the user-by analysing (i) user's personal documents and (i) user's actions performed during Web browsing. Activity (i) aims at categorising users' documents, in order to allow keyword-based search. Activity (ii,) aims instead at determining users' interests. Both activities provide an improved documents searching ability, and help finding users who share common interests, thus promoting potential collaboration among them. SHARK is designed to run on AgentCities, a world-wide network of multi-agent platforms based on the FIPA standard.