We are overwhelmed by the growing availability of information sources in this information age. It becomes harder for people to extract relevant and useful information from information sources such as the Web. It also becomes harder for people to distribute their information to the relevant people who will find it useful through the Internet. Information retrieval and information filtering are commonly used techniques to address the information overload problem. This thesis deals with a community-based multi-agent information retrieval and provision system. It focusses on the development of a keyphrase-based information sharing system for a community of mobile agents.; In this thesis we first review the concept of software agents and their applications. Subsequently, we describe the information sharing activities in our daily life and the requirements that our proposed system should possess. The agents are classified into three categories and their data structures are given. The proposed information sharing system is implemented using the Java programming language and its multithreading technique. Finally, we incorporate the cosine measure method into the Agent-based Community-Oriented Routing Network system (ACORN). We test and evaluate our system by using actual data, which verifies that this system has fulfilled the design requirements. We incorporate the cosine measure method into ACORN and compare the test results of ACORN before and after the incorporation of the cosine measure method. The results indicate that the ACORN information sharing is improved by the incorporation of the similarity measure method.
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