12.1 Introduction

Web communities primarily exist so that people with common interests can communicate and exchange information with each other. Examples of such communities are:

• members of the same company;

• people sharing a common profession, e.g. trade associations;

• any group of people working on some shared enterprise.

Such communities typically have deep reservoirs of knowledge and membership allows users to tap into these. This knowledge can be stored either explicitly in the form of documents or implicitly within the minds of the members. Web communities should therefore aim to access both types of knowledge source so that members can gain the maximum benefit from the community.

In a traditional community, members control the information flow either by one-to-one communication or by broadcasting to a group. For example, certain members are responsible for informing appropriate people about upcoming events. Other members may be regarded as experts on certain topics and can answer queries or direct members to focused documents or people. Intelligent software agents offer an ideal technology for providing novel and automated services for Web communities, combining intelligent routing of documents to people, or people to people, within a single coherent framework.

This chapter describes how a set of technologies has been integrated to produce a complete Web community solution. Initially, various components existed as independent projects in different companies. BT Exact had developed the personal agent framework (PAF), a platform for integrating agent-based personalised information management services. Fujitsu Laboratories had...