Swedish Institute of Computer Science  
Intelligent Systems Laboratory
Project Agent Based Digital Library
Aim
The aim of this project is to create a Virtual Community Library where each user has a personal library and, at the same time, is part of a larger community consisting of the other users' personal libraries and, through intermediators, other digital libraries. Being a part of a community means that each user can benefit from the work put into the other libraries. E.g. by obtaining documents through search queries or recommendations using social filtering and also by getting help to organize the personal library.
Project presentation (under construction)
In the architecture a digital library is seen as a decentralized collection of interacting self-interested agents where an agent represents the knowledge and interests of an individual user. Each agent is perceived as a personal digital library serving one individual user (or other information source).

The personal digital libraries, when aggregated to support the needs of a department, company etc., constitute what we have chosen to call a 'Virtual Community Library' (VCL). Within the VCL, the agents support (automate) the individuals' information acquisition and dissemination tasks information by

  • querying other agents and interpreting the results according to the querying agent's knowledge. (inferring, manipulating knowledge)
  • maintaining subscriptions and publication commitments according to the users' interests. (creating, sharing knowledge)
  • providing speculative recommendations based on a framework for e.g. social of collaborative filtering. (inferring interests)
Within the project we will investigate creation, inferring, manipulation, sharing and compatibility issues pertaining to knowledge about information objects ("metadata"). We do also investigate how agents can also support acquisition and dissemination of information within the community of interacting agents; e.g. though queries, subscriptions or recommendations.
Publications and Papers
  • Rasmusson, A &  Olsson, T &  Hansen, P. 1998. A Virtual Community Library: SICS Digital Library Infrastructure Project. Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. Second European Conference, ECDL’98, Heraklion, Crete, 19-23 September, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol 1513. pp 677-678. Springer. [Poster | PDF]
  • Olsson, T. 1998. Decentralized Social Filtering based on Trust. In: AAAI-98 Recommender Systems Workshop Papers. Technical Report WS-98-08. pp 84-88. AAAI Press. [HTML | Postscript]
  • Olsson, T., Rasmusson, A. and Janson, S. 2000. Personalized Decentralized Communicationt. Will appear in Workshop papers of the AAAI Spring Symposium Series 2000: Bringing Knowledge to Business Processes. [PDF]
Participants