Imitating the knowledge management of communities of practice

Advances in technology have led to the development of knowledge management systems with the intention of improving organizational performance. Nevertheless, implementation of this kind of mechanisms is not an easy task due to the necessity of taking into account social aspects (such as reputation) that improve the exchange of information between groups of people. Considering, the advantages of working with groups with similar interests we have modelled communities of agents which represent communities of people interested in similar topics. In order to implement this model we propose a multi-agent architecture in charge of evaluating the relevance of the knowledge in a knowledge base and the degree of reputation that a person has as the contributor of information. We pay particular attention to showing how the use of the agents works by using a prototype system to search for knowledge related to a particular domain of a community of practice. Several communities of agents integrated into an organization have the capacity to follow the interaction process of employees when carrying out their daily activities.