Agent-Oriented Knowledge Management in Learning Environments: A Peer-to-Peer Helpdesk Case Study

Abstract

In this paper we present an analysis and modeling case study for agent mediated knowledge management in educational environments: Help&Learn, an agent-based peer-to-peer helpdesk system to support extra-class interactions among students and teachers. Help&Learn expands the student's possibility of solving problems, getting involved in a cooperative learning experience that transcends the limits of classrooms. To model Help&Learn, we have used Agent-Object-Relationship Modeling Language (AORML), an UML extension for agent-oriented modeling. The aim of this research is twofold. On the one hand, we aim at exploring Help&Learn's potential to support collaborative learning, discussing its knowledge management strategy. On the other hand, we aim at showing the expressive power and the modeling strengths of AORML.

Analyzing requirements of knowledge management systems with the support of agent organizations

“…This has given life to a new research area known as Agent Organizations. Work in this area has focused, for example, on: a) the complexities of self-organizing communities [20]; b) on how the different roles played by internal and external agents may affect human organizations, and how this understanding might help organizations adapt to changes [5]; and c) on modeling organizational business processes [6,9,14].…”

“…However, especially in KM domains, agent organizations seem to be an interesting approach as agents may represent not only artificial beings, but also the human users and the organizations involved in a given scenario [6,12,13,14,18]. This allows, for example, the requirement engineer to understand, before modeling a KM system itself, how knowledge flows within the organization.…”

“…The KARe system, earlier described in [22], is inspired on developments of an earlier system proposal [14] (we refer to this publication for details on the agent's information and interaction design), and is developed on top of an existing application [1], which presents a semantically enriched technique for content management, and performs the basic peer-to-peer operations needed for this work's purpose. KARe extends this application by providing some degree of proactiveness in recommending items to users, and on building over the existing methods for evolving the available querying and retrieval techniques.…”

“…In this way, the knowledge artifacts exchanged can be modeled as objects, providing the system analyst and designer to represent and reason about them. We refer to [14] for a more extensive discussion and exemplification on the use of AORML for KM, in the context of collaborative learning. Although we acknowledge the possibility of using AORML in domain modeling, we feel that this language lacks the concepts and constructs to support requirements analysis.…”

“…This paradigm seems even more natural when carried out to the Knowledge Management (KM) domain, defining social behavior and processes underlying the organizational settings [6,12,14,18]. Knowledge Management (KM) can be broadly defined as the tools, techniques and processes that contribute to the most effective and efficient management of organizational intellectual assets [16].…”