8.11.1 Brenda Laurel's 1990 book, The Art of Human Computer Interface Design, marked a turning point, attracting attention to the social aspects of intelligent agents. And with the 1996 publication of the Nass and Reeves book, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media as Real People and Places, social interaction took centre stage as a key component of agent and interface design.

8.11.2 A socialware agent system is being developed by Fumio Hattori and Takeshi Ohguro in the Computer Science Laboratory at NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Kyoto Japan. According to the developers of Socialware, a multi agent system focused on social activities on the net, there are three major issues in the support of network communities: The first is how to bring people together, people with similar interests; the second revolves around support of smooth communications, including support for visualising and sharing common contexts, as well as identifying the flow of conversations/discussions; and third, finding relationships between people, including how to identify the objectives/roles of communities and individuals. Multiagent architecture is employed because the participants of a network community are widely distributed, and the number of potential participants is large. No fixed, monolithic system would work. Further, the dynamic nature characteristic of communities makes it such that there can be no fixed organisation. (Hattori et. al.,1999, pg. 54) Part of Socialware is the Community Organiser, which consists of a personal agent for each user and a community agent. Each personal agent has functions to acquire user profile and visualise potential communities around the user. The personal agent locates users in a 2D space and identifies them with their individual icons. Additionally, there is a community board for visualising the structures of discussions. [top]