Introducing domain specific ad-hoc collaboration: the peer-to-peer tool iKnow

Collaboration within and among companies or in (virtual) communities faces a big challenge by the increased dynamics of today´s economical and industrial world. New tools have the potential to overcome one drawback of traditional systems: the effort needed to establish stable infrastructures. Peer-to-peer software seems to fit the demands: it offers ad-hoc collaboration with little overhead. The iK^now tool is a P2P based software that offers communication support. We discuss the benefits of P2P for collaboration, present the iK^now tool and explain the design of future extensions of this tool. Particular importance is laid on the algorithm of matching the peers.