SHARK, a multi-agent system to support document sharing and promote collaboration

This paper describes SHARK, a document-sharing multiagent application providing users with a means to share documents and allowing keyword-based search. SHARK´s agents operate transparently-with respect to the user-by analysing (i) user´s personal documents and (i) user´s actions performed during Web browsing. Activity (i) aims at categorising users´ documents, in order to allow keyword-based search. Activity (ii,) aims instead at determining users´ interests. Both activities provide an improved documents searching ability, and help finding users who share common interests, thus promoting potential collaboration among them. SHARK is designed to run on AgentCities, a world-wide network of multi-agent platforms based on the FIPA standard.