Enhancing Information Sharing Through Agents

This paper presents RAIS, a peer-to-peer multi-agent system for information sharing among a community of users connected through the Internet. RAIS offers a similar search power of Web search engines, but avoids the burden of publishing information on the Web and guarantees a controlled and dynamic access to information. The use of agent technologies has made straightforward the realization of three of the main features of the system: i) filtering of information coming from different users, on the basis of the previous experience of the local user, ii) pushing of new information that can be of interest for a user, and iii) delegation of access capabilities, on the basis of a reputation network, built by the agents of the system on the community of its users.