Socio-contextual model of knowledge sharing among user assisting agents

A goal of user assisting agents is to provide effective assistance to their users in their tasks. The problem becomes challenging when the users are involved in a cognitive activity such as a knowledge gathering task through the web, and when the agents cannot clearly know the task of their users in advance. The challenge grows when the agent themselves do not possess the knowledge required for such tasks. It is in this scenario that we propose a socio-contextual model of knowledge sharing within a community of user assisting agents, provided through the environment of an open domain knowledge portal, which are used by the users for their web based knowledge gathering tasks. The agents involve themselves in a knowledge sharing exercise by implementing the socio-contextual model that may allow each agent to gain knowledge about a task of their interest from other fellow agents through which they can assist their respective users. We evaluate our model through an experiment involving many knowledge gathering tasks from diverse domains and the results indicate interesting implications of the model with respect to the agents, their tasks and their community.