ESMAP: A Multi-Agent Platform for Extending a Knowledge
Management System
Graciela Garca, Ruth Cobos
Escuela Politcnica Superior, Universidad Autnoma de Madrid, 28049, Madrid, Spain.
Graciela.Garcia@estudiante.uam.es, Ruth.Cobos@uam.es
Abstract
For more than one decade Knowledge Management
has taken advantage of some abilities that software agents
are endowed with. Agent features such as autonomy,
cooperation, communication, and learning capacity have
been used to improve the performance of Knowledge
Management applications.
In this paper we outline our proposal for
implementing a Jade-based multi-agent platform to
enhance the potential of KnowCat: a fully consolidated,
thoroughly tested and validated Knowledge Management
system which has been in active use at Universidad
Autnoma de Madrid (Spain) since 1998. We also give a
succinct description of the agent platform architecture
and a brief presentation of its current status.
1. Introduction
Information has become the most available product to
web users nowadays. Hence, the amount of information
that people are faced to handle, is growing much faster
than their capacity to process it [23]. Because of that, the
working place has turned out to be as entropic as never
before. The continuous stream of incoming information to
the workplace is not a new phenomenon. The relatively
new issue is the speed with which information arrives and
the rate with which information changes. Information
technology has made a big contribution to this situation
by providing tools such as Internet, Intranets, email, etc.
Too often users are overwhelmed by too much
information without being able to determine how relevant
it can be and how much impact it may have on their daily
work.
In order to overcome this quagmire, it is essential to
implement procedures and technologies to ensure the
provision of relevant customised information to every
user [16]. Knowledge Management is expected to supply
the necessary support for understanding and
communicating the appropriate information that users
may need to perform their tasks. In this framework,
Knowledge Management support entails the complete
information life cycle: creation, integration, sharing and
distribution. It must be kept in mind that Knowledge
Management does not suppose a mere implementing
technology but a way of consciously using information,
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experience, and expertise to empower people to make the
most appropriate decisions.
As the problem of information overload has become
more acute, a need for more powerful and flexible devices
has arisen. It is then that, software agents begin to be
incorporated to Knowledge Management applications;
they can be considered as an alternative and a successful
manner to tackle the information issue. Agents are used to
search networks to select and alert users of new relevant
information. As well, they are able to filter out less
relevant information from information inputs, or to
produce recommendations to users, among other functions
[26], [27].
Agent-based technologies for Knowledge Management
applications are not novel. These systems have developed
and evolved through the last decade, and because of their
suitability to manage the information quagmire, have
gained public and widespread acceptance. Some examples
of relevant proposals are described in [18], [17], [16], [20]
and [1]. We briefly discuss these approaches in section 2.
Our working scenario is the KnowCat system.
KnowCat is a fully consolidated and thoroughly tested
and validated Knowledge Management system which has
been in active use at Universidad Autnoma de Madrid
(Spain) since 1998. Different experiments have been
carried out to test and validate the KnowCat system. The
results of these experiments are extensively described in
[2], [10], [11], [12] and have demonstrated that KnowCat
is a successful approach.
These auspicious findings have encouraged our line of
work and thus motivated the use of agents in KnowCat.
We believe that an agent-based approach can provide
some extra benefits to the system in terms of added value
to users. Especially due to the fact that knowledge is
distributed among Knowcat knowledge nodes. Because of
that, the search and analysis of knowledge by manual
means can be quite laborious and so more than simple
human intervention may be required. Agents can relieve
users from this kind of tasks
The organisation of this paper is as follows. In the next
section we review some related work. In Section 3 we
present KnowCat the knowledge management system
upon which we build our proposal. In Section 4 we
discuss the proposed approach: ESMAP Platform. In
Section 5 we briefly describe the main enabling
technology used to implement our prototype. In Section 6
we make a brief presentation of the ESMAP architecture.
In section 7 we outline the Expert Recommender Module.
 In section 8 we deal with the current status of our
proposal. Finally, in Section 9 we present our conclusions
and we offer a perspective of our future work in this area.
2. Related Work
A relatively vast amount of investigation has been
carried out in the field of agent-based Knowledge
Management (KM) applications. We have mentioned
before some of the approaches that we consider as
milestones in this area. In this section we briefly review
some of these systems.
One of the earliest approaches to use agents in KM
applications was Liebermans proposal: Letizia [18].
Letizia, is a single-agent system that operates with a
conventional Web browser. The agent tracks the user's
browsing behaviour (follow links, initiate searches, or
request for help) and tries to predict what items may be of
interest to the user. Letizia uses a simple set of heuristics
to model the user's browsing behaviour. When requested,
Letizia may provide a page containing its
recommendations, which the user may choose either to
follow or disregard. As we see, Letizia is basically a
document recommender.
Next in time, Konstan et al. [17] propose a
homogeneous multiagent system called GroupLens.
Homogeneous indicates that the system has mostly one
type of agents; although agents may not have the same
goals, their tasks and capabilities are quite similar. This
approach consists of a system for collaborative filtering of
netnews. Its main goal is to help people find articles that
will interest them among a big mass of available articles.
Users rate articles after reading them. GroupLens uses
these ratings for two purposes. First, to correlate the
ratings in order to determine which users' ratings are most
similar to each other. Second, to predict how well users
will like new articles based on ratings from similar users.
The construction of user profiles is implied. The core of
GroupLens is an open client-server architecture in which
news clients are used to enter ratings and to display
predictions; in turn rating servers are used to distribute
ratings and to deliver predictions. Basically, GroupLens
can be considered as a collaborative filtering
recommender.
Koch and colleagues have provided a later approach
with an outstanding degree of refinement considering the
time in which the proposal was presented. The aims of the
Campiello project described in [16] are: to improve the
connection among local inhabitants of historical places, to
prompt these people to have an active role in the creation
of cultural information and to support new and better
connections with cultural managers and tourists.
Campiello provides a recommender module, a search
module, and a shared data space. Agent architecture is
designed to ensure an easy integration, adaptation and
extensibility of these components. The Campiello
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architecture supports interaction between distributed,
heterogeneous agents and is built on top of the Voyager
platform which is extended towards an agent platform by
the addition of directory and broker services,
administration tools and agent classes.
Preece and colleagues propose the fusion of knowledge
from multiple, distributed and heterogeneous sources in
KRAFT (Knowledge Reuse And Fusion/Transformation))
[20]. KRAFT has an agentbased architecture, in which
all knowledge processing components are software
agents. The architecture uses constraints as a common
knowledge interchange format, expressed in a common
ontology. Knowledge contained in local sources is
translated into the common constraint language, fused
with knowledge from other sources, and then used to
solve a specific problem, or to deliver some information
to users. The generic framework of KRAFT architecture
can be utilised over a wide range of knowledge domains.
For example, it has been used in a network data services
application as well as in prototype systems for advising
students on university transfers, and for advising health
care practitioners on drug therapies. The implementation
of KRAFT is based on the FIPA standard with RDF as a
content language.
A more recent proposal is the one presented by
Abecker et al. in [1]. This approach called the Frodo
project postulates the concept of Organisational Memory.
An Organisational Memory can be viewed as a meta-
information system with multiple ontology-based
structures and a workflow-based context representation
[1].
Each Organisational Memory (OM) is structured in a
four-layer architecture:
The application layer manages the process context in
form of weaklystructured workflows.
The source layer contains information sources with
different degrees of formalisation (processes models,
text documents, etc.)
The knowledge description layer provides uniform
access to the sources by means of ontologies.
The knowledge access layer connects the application
with the source layer.
As a means to cope with complex and heterogeneous
environments and at the same time to keep control of the
system behaviour, FRODO agents are organised in
societies. Consequently, FRODO agents are described in
terms of its knowledge, goals and competencies, as well
as in terms of its rights and obligations. FRODO is
implemented in JADE [15].
Our approach is mainly inspired by the theoretical
work of Bonifacio et al. [5] where a distributed
intelligence paradigm (DIP) for knowledge management
is proposed. Our main contribution to this direction of
research is an implementation of DIP adapted to the
Knowcat environment. In addition, our proposal supports
a relatively wider range of services.
 3. KnowCat: The Working Scenario
KnowCat (Knowledge Catalyser) is a distributed non-
supervised system that supports collaborative Knowledge
Management for knowledge communities. KnowCat is in
use at Universidad Autnoma de Madrid at the present
time, and according to the researchers that have developed
it, its main goal is to empower the crystallisation of
collective knowledge [2], [10], [11].
KnowCat provides a highly structured and organised
framework to find relevant and good quality knowledge
that may be of interest for knowledge communities.
KnowCat comprises a set of topic-specific knowledge
centres called KnowCat knowledge nodes. Each KnowCat
knowledge node can be accessed through a specific URL
using a Web browser.
Within KnowCat, knowledge is organised in a tree
structure (the knowledge tree). The root of this tree
corresponds to the main topic of a knowledge area which
receives the name of KnowCat knowledge node.
Consequently, each node of the knowledge tree is
univocally related to just one specific topic. As well, each
node contains two items: a set of alternative descriptions
of the topic (a set of links to Web documents) and a
refinement of the topic (a list of other nodes or KnowCat
knowledge nodes that can be viewed as sub-topics of the
current topic). As we mentioned before, the main purpose
of KnowCat is to enable the crystallisation of collective
knowledge as the result of user interactions [11].
The concept of knowledge crystallisation results from
the concurrence of three factors: knowledge usage,
endurance of knowledge across time and user opinions
about knowledge. Initially, when a piece of knowledge is
introduced into the system, KnowCat assigns a low value
of acceptance to it. The degree of acceptance of a piece of
knowledge is directly related to how much that piece of
knowledge is appreciated by the community of users [11].
Since at the beginning a piece of knowledge is not known
by users, KnowCat is expected to give a low value of
acceptance to it.
The degree of acceptance of a piece of knowledge
increases as it becomes popular among users and as it
receives their favourable opinions. Consequently a piece
of knowledge is considered crystallised if it is highly
accessed by a great deal of users as time goes by, and if
user opinions about it are advantageous [11]. According
to this, the knowledge crystallisation process is actually
the result of users contributions through their active
interaction with KnowCat. This fact emphasises the
collaborative aspect of the system and in that sense we
can say that KnowCat is user oriented.
Keeping users in mind and trying to provide means to
add more value to them, we propose the implementation
of ESMAP (Extended Services Multi-Agent Platform).
We think of it as a way to enhance the potential of
KnowCat and its construction is the main objective of this
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work. ESMAP is a cooperative multi-agent platform
designed to run in a distributed environment and is
expected to enable the provision of the following new
services:
Automatic mapping of documents and subsequent
classification in the KnowCat knowledge tree.
Documents are processed using content-based
analysis techniques and as a result feature vectors
are obtained. Next, vectors are compared to certain
stored patterns and then, according to the best
matching, documents are classified and placed into
the best fitting knowledge subtree [3], [4], [25].
Dynamic information exchange between KnowCat
knowledge nodes: Mapping documents into feature
vectors that are then stored in a repository, allows
the fast identification and location of documents
related to a certain topic. A specialised agent (node
agent) attached to each node is responsible for
letting other node agents know about the knowledge
content of its node and eventually exchange
information about a searched topic. Furthermore,
meaning negotiation may be implied [5].
Document recommendation. Content analysis
techniques and the construction of user profiles are
to be used to produce document recommendation to
users [14], [22], [24].
Refine crystallisation values by incorporating new
implicit interest indicators to the crystallisation
computation. According to [9], users behaviour can
be a good source of implicit information about what
users find interesting during their interaction with
web pages. Some actions that users carry out can be
considered as positive interest indicators, while
others may be classified as negative interest
indicators. Actions such as saving a page as a file,
emailing a page, printing it, copying and pasting,
searching in the page for text, scrolling, spending
more time on a page, following a link or visiting the
same page repeatedly can be regarded as positive
interest indicators. Conversely, the absence of
positive interest indicators can be judged as a sign of
negative interest [9]. More realistic crystallisation
values are to be obtained by taking into account
some of the implicit sources of interest that we
remark above.
Automatic extraction of social opinions supplied by
users regarding document quality: Knowcat provides
a mechanism to collect user assessments or weight
assertions about every document located in the
repository. Users are allowed to select one of a few
provided options about different parts or general
characteristics of a document, such as title,
conclusions, content, structure, etc. For each of the
above-mentioned elements, users are prompted to
rate different document aspects such as originality,
length, interest, correctness, etc. Values may range
 from 0 (lowest value) to 10 (the highest one). The
main improvement to achieve in this service is to
automatically extract meaningful information such
as social opinions, from the analysis of these
assessments. That information can be then used, to
help authors increase the degree of acceptance of
their documents as well as significantly reduce the
time needed to create good quality documents.
Expert recommendation: In the KnowCat
environment an expert is defined as a user who has
supplied a piece of knowledge, which has
crystallised [2], [11]. Common users may seek
experts as a source of information to complement or
replace other sources such as documents or
databases. Expert recommendation intends to find
relevant experts by identifying relationships between
experts and documents. In our proposal the basic
mechanism involves the participation of an
intelligent agent that keeps track of the documents
that users visit in order to extract contacts in some
specific areas. Those contacts as well as their area of
expertise are later presented to users [19]. See
section 7.
In the following section we present the problems that
ESMAP and the built-in services that we have just
detailed are expected to tackle.
We have stated earlier that the fore mentioned services
add value to users, but more specifically in what sense
may they assist users? What are the benefits that users
may perceive as a consequence of the proposed
implementation? We believe that the most outstanding
improvements are the following:
Reduction of information overload: As documents
and experts are recommended, users are prompted to
go right to the point instead of having to wander
aimlessly among a mass of documents to find out if
they are relevant to their search or not. For that
reason users are relieved from the burden of dealing
with large amounts of data.
More efficient use of time: Because of the twofold
aspect of recommendation (documents and experts),
users are not required to spend a lot of time scanning
uninteresting documents or searching for appropriate
contacts when trying to find an expert. On the other
hand, authors may as well be guided throughout the
process of document creation thanks to the feedback
that comes from users assessments. As a
consequence, time needed to plan and develop
documents can be drastically decreased.
Fewer tasks to perform: The proposed system
undertakes some of the tasks that used to be users
responsibility, especially those related with
information search.
Minimisation of vocabulary problem: Due to
differences in vocabulary usage among knowledge
communities, efficiency can be dramatically reduced
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at the stage of information processing [8]. It is a fact
that terms used by certain groups of individuals to
classify information items, may not serve as
appropriate retrieval indication for others in different
situations or task domains. Mapping documents into
feature vectors is expected to minimise this kind of
vocabulary problems and thus facilitate information
exchange.
Help users to access distributed knowledge, which
may be located across the different KnowCat
knowledge nodes. Thanks to the information
exchange that takes place among the Node agents,
accessing remote information is completely
transparent for users.
4. The Proposed Approach
Information spaces are complex by nature, basically
due to the intrinsic characteristics of information itself.
This sort of environments is highly dynamic as
information is constantly changing and since the amount
of the new incoming information is often unpredictable
[7]. To add more complexity to the scenario, users needs
are also under permanent change themselves. All these
components meet together in KnowCat and that is why it
becomes an attractive and challenging environment for
the use of agents. Agents can assist users in dealing with
such a continuous flow of information.
The proposal is then to build a platform of adaptive
autonomous agents, which can be responsive to the
information needs that users may have. In keeping with
this direction agents can automate repetitive tasks, process
complex data as means to generate valuable information,
learn from users, and provide recommendations to them.
In order to get their job done, agents are expected to
have roles and according to them may develop the
following basic abilities:
Interact with front-end users through user-friendly
interfaces.
Acquire relevant data from distributed repositories.
Perform information retrieval and data mining when
necessary.
Cooperate with other agents in order to accomplish
collaborative tasks.
Two important issues that derive from the stated above
and that we address later in this paper are the following:
How single agents should relate with each other in
order to maximally exploit their capacities, so that
the systems global goals can be accomplished
efficiently.
How information and knowledge exchange should
take place among agents so that the system can
successfully respond to users needs and to
unexpected situations.
 While the first issue deals greatly with communication source ontology editor for ontology definition and Jade
matters, the second one focuses on cooperation aspects Bean Generator to generate ontology classes.
but both imply the development of a clear coordination
strategy. 6. ESMAP Architecture
5. Enabling Technologies ESMAP provides a unified environment in which
different kinds of agents are integrated. These agents
Various enabling technologies are used to implement interact among them to retrieve, filter, and combine
the ESMAP prototype. The most important one is JADE information from distributed network-based information
[15]. The main reason for this selection is because of its sources and to provide suggestions to users while they
following attributes: portability, openness, high scalability interact with the system. A first version of the multi-agent
and a built-in messaging system. platform has been implemented and is structured as
Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE) is an shown in Figure 1.
open source agent-based middleware, fully implemented
in Java and FIPA compliant. Jade provides a basal
framework together with a set of packages, to enable the User Agent
construction of multi-agent systems.
Agent platforms developed in Jade can be distributed
User
across different machines; they may even support Expert
different operative systems and are customisable through Agent
a remote graphical interface. As Jade complies with FIPA
specifications, it provides some required components for
Broker Agent
agent management:
DF (Directory Facilitator): provides a yellow-page
service. As so, DF registers every service that is
provided within the agent platform.
AMS (Agent Management System): provides a
Node Node Node
white-page service. Besides, it is responsible of Agent1 Agent2 Agentn
agent lifecycle and agent directory services.
ACC (Agent Communication Channel): controls
message exchange among agents. Information
Agents are created by instantiating a class, which Agent Databases
extends the Agent class. Agents are identified within the
agent platform by a unique global name. In order to be
Figure 1. ESMAP Architecture
useful, agents are expected to perform certain tasks, that
means to exhibit certain predefined behaviours. All tasks
The system has different generic types of agents: user
are instances of the Behaviours class.
agents, expert agents, node agents, information agents and
Jade agent communication is based on the
a broker agent.
asynchronous message-passing paradigm, which complies
with the FIPA ACL [13] standard. Messages are instances The broker agent acts as an intermediary for all
of the ACLMessage class. Agents construct and decode messages between any couple of agents.
messages internally. To facilitate agent communication, User agents are interface agents that interact with
JADE offers various already implemented FIPA-specified users capturing user actions and providing results to
interaction protocols; these are Query, Request and them. Also, user agents observe user
Contract-Net. behaviours/reactions and build current users profiles
It is required that agents share semantics so that according to their observations.
communication between agents can take place. Expert Agents provide expert lists to users based on
Exchanged messages must have a content, which has to the calculation of expert status of users and on user
be written in a certain language, and which must refer to profiles that user agents supply.
the same ontology. JADE provides support for using both Node agents handle the information related to
content languages and ontologies. Building ontologies KnowCat knowledge nodes.
manually can be an additional burden when designing Information agents have models of information
multi-agent systems; JADE allows the utilisation of some sources, information access strategies and
tools for assisting the automatic construction of correspondent task agents to which the information
ontologies. Some examples are Protg [21] an open must be transferred.

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 Two further issues are under our consideration at the
present time. The first one is if an additional mechanism
for scheduling activities when an agent receives some
kind of input may be necessary or not. The second one is
to determine a controlled way of dealing with error
conditions such as lost messages.
7. The Expert Recommender Module
The main purpose of expert recommendation is to
facilitate the location of expertise knowledge.
Consequently, this module is expected to propitiate access
to knowledge in all forms, including knowledge held by
people (implicit knowledge) [28]. As we mentioned
before, in the KnowCat environment, any user who has
supplied a piece of knowledge that has crystallised is
considered an expert. According to this and keeping in
mind that the degree of acceptance of documents may
vary with time, the expert status of users must be
reviewed on regular basis.
When a certain user logs into the system, his user
agent is created and insofar as this user accesses different
documents his user agent builds and updates his current
user profile. In this way, user profiles are automatically
generated without the need to ask users to rate or fill up
questionnaires that are hard to maintain across time.
In Figure 2 we present the structure of the expert
recommender module, showing the main actors that take
part in it, as well as the most relevant inputs and outputs
of the process.
The expert recommender module consists of a main
agent, the expert agent, which interacts with other agents
such as user and information agents to elaborate a
recommendation list. The expert agent is created right
after the user agent, and is responsible for calculating the
expert status at that time and for providing the
corresponding expert list to the user. To build the expert
list, the expert agent must consider both: the user profile
and the expert status of users at a given moment in the
system. In order to avoid redundant calculation of expert
status, a control mechanism has been devised. The expert
list that is provided to users contains the following data:
expert names, degree of expertise of each expert, topic of
expertise and the corresponding email addresses.
Automatic user profile building and automatic
calculation of expert status have some advantages such as:
a) relieve users from the burden that entails providing
rates or answering questionnaires and b) avoid operations
of continuous user profile updating. Besides the
information about user interests can be considered more
reliable since it is obtained based on real facts instead of
on user opinions.
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6 5
User
1
Expert List
2
User Agent
Accessed
Documents
3
User 4 Expert Agent
Profile
Figure 2. The Expert Recommender Module
8. Current Status
We have already prototyped the largest part of the
agent platform architecture as described here, together
with the recommender module as well. At the present
time we are ready to begin the testing phase which
comprises two main areas of activities: 1) data collecting
and 2) analysis and discussion of results.
Data will be gathered from user activities on the web
involving some active KnowCat knowledge nodes.
Subsequent analysis and interpretation of the data
from these areas may lead to important actions. If
validation of the proposal is successful we will continue
to work in this direction, otherwise substantial changes
will addressed.
9. Conclusions and Future Work
We have presented the general framework and design
decisions regarding our multi-agent platform for the
extension of KnowCats current services. We believe and
expect that our ideas make a positive contribution to
support collaborative knowledge management in the
KnowCat environment. Just like Knowcat that was
successfully validated by exhaustive experimentation [2]
[10] [11] [12], a series of experiments will be conducted
in order to determine the suitability of the ESMAP
proposal.
Concerning future work and insofar as other services
are implemented, parallel exploration of relevant issues
such as agent coordination and negotiation becomes
critical. Furthermore, there are some research issues that
still remain open from our point of view. For example,
those related with the use of agent learning. We want to
explore and experiment with different learning schemes in
order to determine the best fitting for our working
environment. Regarding this issue, our personal pending
question is to find out if the use of learning has a direct
 impact on the global performance of the KnowCat-
ESMAP association.
Initial results of our investigations, where we measure
the impact of the Multiagent Platform on system
performance, will be analysed and reported before the end
of the year. Depending on the results obtained through
data collection, analysis of results and interpretation, new
areas of future research may arise.
Acknowledgements
This work has been partly funded by the Spanish
National Plan of R+D, project number TSI2005-08225-
C07-06.
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