Towards an integrated methodology to develop KM solutions with the support of agents

Activities related to knowledge management (KM) processes require changes within the organizational processes in order to accommodate new goals and tasks, besides changing the way people view and do their work. In this paper, we argue that agents are suitable for modeling KM contexts, due to their cognitive characteristics, such as goals, beliefs, and reactivity. However, besides a good abstraction, the development of adequate solutions requires a consistent software engineering methodology. To help fill in this gap, we describe some results of our work on an integrated agent-oriented methodology to develop KM system, using a KM typical scenario. We consider all humans, organizations and existing systems as agents. The model enables the designer to understand and describe relations between entities before development of the system. Furthermore, different cognitive characteristics of agents are used in different phases of the development cycle.