Fostering Knowledge Reuse in Communities of Practice by Using a Trust Model and Agents

Abstract

Currently, knowledge management is a key issue for companies as it gives them a competitive advantage. A Community of Practice (CoP) is a means to encourage employees to manage knowledge and enables them to exchange knowledge and experience. Members of these communities, however, are often geographically distributed. This hinders the development of feelings of trust between their members, which limits knowledge reuse. Our proposal seeks to minimize the effect of lack of trust between CoP members, thereby fostering the exchange of knowledge. To achieve this goal, we propose a trust model to calculate trust among CoP members, along with a multi-agent architecture to automatically manage the trust model in a CoP. The agents calculate a trust value in each situation, taking the user’s profile into account. We also present a tool that recommends sources of knowledge and documents that are trustworthy.