Agent-mediated Knowledge Management is a promising approach to handle and maintain knowledge, especially in a distributed and mobile environment. One example for such an environment is a mobile community: mobile individuals that group together because they share the same interests. The members of a mobile community maintain a common knowledge base by exchanging and managing information via mobile devices (e.g. PDAs). Trust is essential in such an environment for the assessment of communication partners and their knowledge. This paper presents our conceptual framework for trust-based agent-mediated knowledge exchange with respect to the highly distributed environment of mobile communities. We extend an existing knowledge management system by using mobile agents that serve as autonomous delegates of mobile users. These mobile delegates spread out onto other devices and trade knowledge while the user is not present. When the user and one of his delegates get in contact again, a knowledge reconciliation takes place. We propose a trust-based approach to the process of autonomous knowledge acquisition. Trust is organized in a distributed way among the participants of a mobile community and serves as a basis for the decisions of mobile delegates and mobile users.
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