TWA: An experimental approach for studying knowledge sharing in multicultural cooperation

Cooperative work involves several specialists who necessarily have different cultures, which leads to misunderstandings. International cooperation adds language problems and increases the cultural differences, making the sharing of knowledge even more complex. The paper reports some problems encountered in different collaborative situations. It proposes an experimental system, TWA, based on a multi-agent approach architectured around the concept of personal assistant agent. The goal is to study how to better understand the problem and to try to smooth out the cultural differences between participants in cooperative projects.