ToothAgent: A Multi-agent System for Virtual Communities Support

Abstract

People tend to form social networks within geographical areas. This can be explained by the fact that generally geographical localities correspond to common interests (e.g. students located in a university could be interested to buy or sell textbooks adopted for a specific course, to share notes, or just to meet together to play basketball). Cellular phones and more in general mobile devices are currently widely used and represent a big opportunity to support social communities. In this paper, we present a general architecture for multi-agent systems accessible via mobile devices (cellular phones and PDAs), where Bluetooth technology has been adopted to reflect users locality. We illustrate ToothAgent, an implemented prototype of the proposed architecture, and discuss the opportunities offered by the system.

Trustworthy Agent-Based Recommender System in a Mobile P2P Environment

“…2), similar concepts to VA can be found in the literature. For example, the Advertisement Infrastructure [15] is a space where agents can build collaborative plans, while the ToothAgent system [16] offers a centralised service that agents use to interact and to meet servers on behalf of their users. The VA novelty is to allow entities to build their own subjective network of trust (TRec and TRat).…”

Sweeper-Agent Recommendations-Tree Early Scheme

“…At the same time, we assume that the university has got distributed servers able to recognize the student's moves and make a certain communication with that user. We also assume a that Sweeper-Agent works within a Used-Books offering system, ToothAgent [3], that is able to communicate with mobile users through a Bluetooth connection and exchange useful information corresponding to a student's interests. ( Figure.1) Figure 1: Users, servers, and virtual communities of personal agents.…”

“…( Figure.1) Figure 1: Users, servers, and virtual communities of personal agents. [3] As long as the student is moving and recognized by these distributed servers, a connection record is always updated and referring to the user's new location. Also, a little but feasible time-to-live (TTL) is added to each updated request, which makes the system obliged to search automatically for the student's new location and update with the new status.…”

“…The ToothAgent [3] architecture is portal multi-agentplatforms-based that can be installed in server where Multi-agent techniques are enabled; each server handles a specific data service area, and system users can contact their personal agents using their Bluetooth integrated devices. Notably, ToothAgent is domain and technology-independent, so specific services provided by a server do not affect the system, and different technologies can be used in different sights.…”

“…Consequently, communication among agents and mobile devices is based on one-to-one communication protocol, in a way that allows receiving and processing requests obtained by users. Distinction between agents is realized through the unique Bluetooth address of the corresponding address [3]. Finally, results are sent back to the user and a list of all visited servers that cooperated with this service is saved to be reviewed by user later on.…”