MOVING FROM INFORMAL INTERACTION TO FOCUSED KNOWLEDGE SHARING AMONG USERS IN AN AGENT-BASED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

Informal interaction among users may reveal significant information regarding their behaviors in smallcommunities. Although apps like WhatsApp are very popular for informal interaction activities, they, however, lack in providing the user with contextual information of other users present in the surroundings who might be helpful in addressing the queries thus enabling focused information exchange. Thus, there is a requirement of informal interactive environments that can be built on-the-fly, providing anytime-anywhere cost-effective interaction possibilities to the users. Mobile adhoc networks that can be built over wireless networks using wi-fi enabled smart phones, can provide a promising solution to the above problem, even in regions lacking adequate infrastructure. This paper proposes MAKSS, a mobile agent-based knowledge sharing system, comprising mobile user agents to facilitate information exchange among groups of users available in a close vicinity like a college campus. In this system, a user agent belongs to two views- a) a physical view formed by cellular frequency ranges of mobile devices b) a context view constituting a group of user agents having similar interests or contexts. These views help in dissemination of user queries and responses within a group (multicasting) or their routing to the intended persons (of same context as sender but belonging to different physical views). The simulated experiment highlights that the proposed system would work well in introducing users to the focused groups and also evaluates how user agents behave in the collaborative process of knowledge exchange on the parameters of inquisitiveness, responsiveness, reciprocity and cooperativeness.