Toothagent: a Multi-Agent System for Virtual Communities Support

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.