Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal 0 (2011) 1 1

IOS Press

Using multiagent self-organization techniques

for seeking information in virtual social
communities
Annabelle Mercier a , Michel Occello a and Jean-Paul Jamont a
a
LCIS - Grenoble University
50 rue Barthelemy de Laffemas
BP 54 - 26902 Valence Cedex 9
E-mail:annabelle.mercier@iut-valence.fr,
michel.occello@iut-valence.fr,
jean-paul.jamont@iut-valence.fr

Abstract. This paper proposes an approach which aims at improving information access (skills, services) in large networks. It
proposes a self-organized multiagent analysis of the problem allowing to reduce the number of messages transmitted for a skill
search. The MWAC (Multi-Wireless-Agent Communication) model is extended to take some specificities of social networks into
account, like the information held by the social network members and their connections with the others.
The network of agents may represent a social network. Each agent holds information about members (agents) and is linked
with other agents which represent its neighborhood. Each member builds a local network representation according to its needs.
A global view of a social network is not dynamically available and furthermore not desirable. Our approach is thus based on a
decentralized interrogation of the network and on organizational structures detection.
With this method, a search does not need to flood all the network with the query because it uses the self-organized structure
that emerges so, it can avoid a saturation in the network and it reduces the amount of transmitted messages. In order to show
the interest of the approach, our proposition is validated by several simulations. The applications of this work are related to skill
searching in a virtual social network.

Keywords: multiagent systems, self-organization techniques, social networks, skill searching

1. Introduction well-known. Users regularly update their profile both

The communications on the Internet can be traced
to represent the social activity of people to build so-
cial intelligence. There are several usages on the web :
a communication from a person can be viewed by an-
other (mail, chat), by a group of people (web site) and
vice versa (social network profile). Recently the use
of social networking applications on the Internet has
grown significantly. Users describe their profile, con-
stitute their friends’network, send messages or chat di-
rectly with friends. Web applications has become a
computer media for social networks offering more and
more services, for example, finding friends is the most
in social network platforms or to benefit from loyalty
programs. This behavior, which has become usual in
private life, may be capitalized within the company in
the professional context. Regularly updated, informa-
tion reflecting the skills acquired during a career (in-
ternships and training program for example) but also
the ones that describe job tasks and missions of the em-
ployee would make an available skill inventory and de-
scribe the human capital of the company. However, the
confidentiality and security of company data must be
respected. A specific application, internal to the com-
pany computer network must be used rather than a so-
cial networking platforms available on the Web and li-

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2 Mercier et al. / Using multiagent self-organization techniques for seeking information in virtual social communities
able to unavoidable security holes. This paper doesn’t
describe a real world application, but a fundamental
study, motivated by the need for such applications ex-
pressed by a manager in the mass retail sector in order
to find a person on the internal network of the com-
pany that could fill a vacancy. In this kind of activity,
changing a job is quite frequent. Thus, the goal is to
easily and rapidly locate the right person with the re-
quired skills. It is useful to build a virtual map of the
organization. Such an application must be designed as
part of a private web taking all necessary guarantees
to anticipate computer network attacks. From an appli-
cation point of view, two points are interesting in this
case of use :
– since a large company with many employees is
concerned, the mass of information required to
define skills and job profiles of employees is im-
portant ;
– businesses in the mass retail network are struc-
tured in various centers distributed over a terri-
tory. We can assume that the information is also
distributed on the servers of these centers while
being interconnected through the private com-
puter network of the company.
For this use case, an alternative solution may be to
search the human resources information in a large cen-
tralized database. The mass of information is important
and information needs are very specific. A database
application providing all useful SQL requests is incon-
ceivable. An information retrieval method may meet
the first need, but the rapid evolution of information
can cause problems because it requires to be frequently
updated by merging the indexes, several methods focus
on the cost of these treatments [10,30]. Furthermore,
supplying relevant information in real time would im-
pose that other users (not employees) update profiles,
which would be too tedious. However a validation
of profiles by the direct supervisor would be realis-
tic to guarantee information integrity. Therefore, our
proposal is to represent the employees with their data
(skills, activities, missions) and their connections with
other employees (an employee has relationships with
his boss, colleagues of the same service or same indus-
try activity in the company).
With the growth of social applications, there is new
data to analyze social behavior with traditional meth-
ods described in section 2, but there is a lack of tools
and services for these social applications. Our goal is
not to understand social network from a sociological
point of view, but is to provide a tool to find informa-
tion and members’ skills in a social network. Our ap-
proach is placed on the user field : how can he join a
person or a group with the same interest ? How can he
have complementary knowledge ?
Our proposal is based on a model of multiagent sys-
tem whose purpose is to map the business organization
relevant to an information need, or widely to access
agents who have the required information.
On one hand, agents of the multiagent system hold
information about employees providing skills and ser-
vices, and on the other hand, they are bound or discuss
with agents representing their closest colleagues that is
to say, located in the agent’s neighborhood.
A multiagent system (MAS) is a set of agents situ-
ated in a common environment, which interact and at-
tempt to reach a set of goals. Through these interac-
tions a global behavior, more intelligent than the sum
of the local intelligence of multiagent system compo-
nents, can emerge. An agent is a software entity evolv-
ing in an environment that it can perceive and in which
it acts. It is fitted with autonomous behaviors and has
objectives. Autonomy is the main concept in the agent
issue: it is the ability of agents to control their actions
and their internal states. The autonomy of agents im-
plies no centralized control [29].
One of the advantages of MAS is that it allows
to model systems where a global description is not
possible at any given moment. Our approach uses
a topology emerging from network agents to pro-
vide access to information step by step through the
agents’neighborhood.
We propose an organization model and various sim-
ulations to validate our approach.
Our proposal is the result of the fusion of several
contributions of our team on diverse fields involved in
this work. The model of self-organized multiagent sys-
tem used to access information is an extension of the
MWAC model [19] dedicated to information routing in
open sensor networks. Seeking skills or services take
benefit of our contributions to information retrieval [7]
and to services composition [1] using multiagent ap-
proaches.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Our
approach is motivated in section 2 which also shows
the related work in social network analysis. Our self-
organization multiagent model in the context of social
networks is presented in section 3. Section 4 presents
the MWAC model adaptation for skill searching and
message routing. The model is validated by several
simulations results. The architecture which can be ap-
plied for the case study example is proposed in sec-
 Mercier et al. / Using multiagent self-organization techniques for seeking information in virtual social communities
tion 5. Future research directions and conclusion are
developed in section 6.
2. Our Approach
2.1. Existing network structure representations
Social networks are a kind of large interacting net-
work where local interplays are more well-known than
global behaviors. In the literature, there are a lot of
methods to model and analyze large networks.
Classically producing models consists in building
mathematical objects reflecting real networks. In the
context of social networks, models are useful for net-
work description, analysis and simulation. Amblard
(2002) classifies techniques for social network model-
ing into three categories: graphs, sociological statisti-
cal models and agent based models [2].
Theoretical methods try to build graphs owning the
properties of real networks. Theoretical models see a
network as an exogenous entity without making differ-
ences between link types. They adopt a graph represen-
tation with nodes and links between nodes. For Lebhar
and Schabanel, these models reproduce three main real
networks properties: (i) small diameter, (ii) distribu-
tion degree following a power law, and (iii) node clus-
tering [22]. The small diameter represents the longest
of the shortest path between two nodes of the network.
It was observed that the diameter is about the loga-
rithm of the number of nodes. The Small world model,
the most popular model in social network, is based on
the idea of Watts and Strogatz [27]. Random graphs of
Erdös and Renyi [13] are the most used for modeling
real networks especially for social network analysis.
They follow the second property (ii). A clustering co-
efficient which is the measure of the degree at which
nodes in a graph tend to cluster together, is introduced
in the model of Watts and Strogatz. A more recent im-
provement of small worlds is Kleinberg’s model which
shows an approach for navigation in large scale in-
teracting networks [21]. Scale-free networks [5] take
into account observation of the power law distribu-
tion node’s degree. The graph is built with an iterative
method.
The sociological approach adopts statistical models.
It focuses on the relationships between network mem-
bers and tries to introduce dynamics in the creation of
new links. There can mention Holland and Leinhardt
model [17], metric model [3], triad completion model
[16], and variance degree [8].
3
Most of these methods are used to simulate social
networks by doing link analysis. Most of them do not
take member changes into account and lead to a static
analysis. Some approaches introduce the consideration
of node decisions and of the dynamics of the establish-
ment of relations.
Cellular automata are regular lattices of cells, each
one being a finite state automaton. Their different ex-
tension [28,4] are good candidates trying to consider
graphs or grids with active nodes. They are used to
simulate interactions between nodes, and to under-
stand the rationality of a social network [32].
Finally, methods based on multiagent theory [11,31,
6] focus on members’ pro-activity. Link creation is ini-
tiated by nodes, which possess knowledge about them-
selves and their environment. These methods are used
for agent-based social simulation [14]. Other methods
based on agent theory focus on recommendation and
reputation in social networks [26,25,9].
In this paper, we do not attempt to supply a new tool
to model a social network in order to understand and
analyze it, neither to make a proposal on members be-
havior characterization.
Our work aims at supplying new functionalities
to social network platform users. The functionalities
must take the dynamics of the network and of the users
requirements into account. Positioned on a node which
represents a member, we propose a technique allowing
a user to transmit a message or to search for a skill or a
service using its local information and its environment.
To face the scale of the network, our approach is
based on multiagent theory and is decentralized. We do
not focus on a global modeling of the network but on a
dynamic construction of partial representations of the
network for each node. This is a way to proceed with
the continuous network evolution.
In other words, we add a virtual layer to the sys-
tem offering social software infrastructures. This layer
(i) provides new functions or services adapted to the
user, (ii) adapts itself to the dynamic evolution of the
network and (iii) does not depend on the platform im-
plementations since it is implemented as a decentral-
ized middleware. We thus introduce an abstract view
of the social network regardless of the implementa-
tion. The physical organization can then be a central-
ized server, n-third architectures or distributed systems
without any impact on our model.
4 Mercier et al. / Using multiagent self-organization techniques for seeking information in virtual social communities
2.2. From a global point of view to a member point of
view
A user of the social network system is represented
by a node. With his neighborhood - that is to say the
nodes it is related to - such a member can have ac-
cess to services, skills and knowledge provided by the
neighbors. We do not compute a path from the infor-
mation of the whole graph but we use the agent node
local view. Another characteristic is to take into ac-
count the members’ changes. For example, a member
can break connections to others or can add knowledge
or services. The new services supplied by the nodes
can be accessed in real time. This way, the tool should
follow the dynamic evolution of the agent community.
If a service appears on a node, it can be accessed if
it is queried. We do not have to get a photography of
the whole graph since we have a way to access the
service from the local information. We do not make a
static and centralized analysis of the whole graph but
we know that we are able to get the information in a de-
centralized way from a node. This approach is adapted
to large scale graphs. Moreover, it provides a decen-
tralized tool to search knowledge based on members’
relationships and members’ knowledge which repre-
sent the semantics of the nodes. At the moment, the
focus is only on finding the service or a way to reach
the service. The service relevance defined in informa-
tion retrieval or the service recommendation level like
in multiagent system should be addressed in perspec-
tive. The network structure emerges according to the
knowledge exploiting the semantic information of the
node.
2.3. An adaptive network structure representation
The network topology influences the efficiency of
the member’s requests [15]. Several approaches try to
model real networks with mathematical objects ; this
type of graphs is used for static links analysis. On
the contrary, our approach is devoted to following the
member’s changes dynamically so that the network
topology has to be adaptive. Moreover, this topology
should be built using local node information in the con-
text of large scale networks. The MWAC model [19]
constructs a self-organized network which can be used
in the field of social network. Section 3.2 describes the
modeling of social network with the MWAC model.
Without global information about the social network,
the network structure emerges from node information.
It is not a thematic community discovery but a network
topology discovery. Then, with this topology, routing
queries and searching thematic communities should
be adaptive. Contrary to this, several approaches are
devoted to find communities by using a set of fixed
data. For example, Diehl et al. (2007) is based on an
email corpus analysis to find the borders of communi-
ties [12]. Mobasher et al. (2000) carry out the discov-
ery with log analysis [23]. These kinds of methods are
not adapted to follow a member activity in real time
in a large scale network. For scaling issues, a decen-
tralized view is more adapted. The social network is
represented by a set of interacting nodes. A member
in the social network is represented by a node which
holds information or skills, internal behavior and links
to other members (nodes). Step by step, a path to other
nodes can be built to access required services or skills.
3. A model to organize dynamically a social
network
3.1. Agentifying the social network
We consider that each member of the social net-
work is an agent. Each member holds services, skills
or knowledge. In a first approach, each service will be
described by a set of keywords. Each agent will have a
list of services:
service_list = < [keyword]∗ , service_name >.
The objective for a node is to look for other nodes able
to achieve services or to provide the information. For
the previous example on skills searching in a company,
the services can hold knowledge about employee com-
petencies or job descriptions.
For each agent we define a perception field as all
the agents it can perceive i.e. all the agents it is friends
with (or related to). We assume that a social member is
at least friend with the agent which has invited him in
the network or with the agents of the interest group it
joined at its introduction into the network. Each agent
owns knowledge about itself and about the others, as
for example the list of friends. We can define the socia-
bility score S as proportional to the number of related
agents.
For each node, we can define a workload (W ) whose
objective is to express the activity of a member i.e. the
computational resources it consumes (if artificial) or
the free time it can have (if human) to manage informa-
tion and requests. The activity can be calculated from
the current number of services an agent supplies to its
neighbors (through service relations) and the number
 Mercier et al. / Using multiagent self-organization techniques for seeking information in virtual social communities
of neighbors. For human assistant agents we can mea-
sure this workload through the number of connections
to the network on a given time period. The higher a
node activity is, the less time is required to contact its
friends.
3.2. Adapting the MWAC model
The MWAC model, which is a model of self-
organized multiagent system is extended to access in-
formation in social networks. In such multiagent sys-
tem, the autonomy of agents implies no centralized
control. In opposition to the case of a programmed
functionality, the designer does not need to consider
all the possibilities the system has to react to each sit-
uation. The objective is to reduce the number of re-
quests induced by the most simple topologies currently
used in social networks (as simple graphs). We will
use an organization structure based on the roles of the
agents in request transmissions. Our organizational ba-
sic structures are constituted by (see fig 1):
– one and only one group representative agent (r)
managing the communication in its group,
– some connection agents (c) which know the dif-
ferent representative agents and can belong to
several groups,
– some simple members (m) which are active in the
communication process only for their own tasks
(They do not ensure information relay).
Representative agent (r)
Flooded links
Connection agent (c)
Fig. 1. Our organizational structure
The reduction of the number of messages sent pro-
ceeds from the fact that the sending is only directed to
5
the representative agent of the groups and to some con-
nection agents. To be more precise in the case of a tra-
ditional network, a receiver path research with flood-
ing techniques will cost a number of emissions equals
to the number of neighbors.
Our model introduces a self-organization mecha-
nism which integrates a management policy based
on the node activity. The organizational structures
will thus dynamically emerge. A group is constituted
by one group representative agent, some connection
agents and possibly some simple members. The agents
have a common scheme but their role allows them to
adopt some behaviors with the messages of neighbor
agents. In fact, all agents have the same introduction
protocol, they work to detect and correct organization
inconsistencies since a message reception and want to
obtain services from others.
Moreover, a representative agent must manage all
messages sent to its group: when an agent satisfying
the request is not in the sender’s neighborhood, then
a route must be found by the sender’s representative
agents to pursue the search. It is thus more solicited
than other agents. A connection agent must maintain
relations between its neighbor representative agents.
So, its role is to transmit the messages concerning re-
cipients located in the group to its representative agent.
A representative agent is very solicited, from a com-
munication point of view. On average, it will spend
more energy than the others in relational activity: so
it will have less time to satisfy service requests. The
more members there are in a group, the greater the ben-
efit in the reduction of transmitted volume induced by
the flood: the system thus reduces the number of mes-
sages. The ideal representative agent is the most social
member (the one having the most important number
of friends) and which is not overbooked, having the
most important time available to solicit them (i.e. with
the lowest workload). Representatives have the highest
centrality.
The attribution of a role must integrate this infor-
mation. The organization is built according to an ex-
change of message between agents. We use role alloca-
tion based self-organization mechanisms achieving the
representative agent election. This function estimates
Simple member agent (s)
Hierarchical links
the concordance between its desire to be the boss and
its capacity to accede to this position. Our representa-
tive election function integrates some data on neigh-
bors and activity levels. The decision algorithm is very
simple, in case of conflict a mechanism of election is
applied taking the one having the widest service of-
fer (P ) and the lowest workload (W ) defined in sec-
6 Mercier et al. / Using multiagent self-organization techniques for seeking information in virtual social communities

P
tion 3.1. This function can be proportional to W where this, all agents can use messages they send, receive or
P = (|SN | − |S − S ∩ SN |) with S the set of services relay from which they can extract some authorized in-
supplied by the representative and S N supplied by its formation like the receiver, the sender, the type of mes-
neighborhood. sage.
The messages acknowledgement is also used in this
process of adaptation. When a message is not acknowl-
01 IF neighborNumber>0 THEN edged, the concerned representative agents remove the
02 * One has neighbors road of their tables and a new path search procedure is
03 IF neighborRepresentativeNumber=0 THEN started.
04 * None of our neighbors is representative:
05 * one decides to become one. This case 3.3. Experiments
06 * intervenes when one has just created
07 * the agent or when it is isolated. In order to test and to evaluate our approach, we
08 * One does not proceed to a vote because one have adapted the MASH simulator presented in [18]
09 * makes the system unstable (the member surely that we have developed for the MWAC evaluation.
10 * goes on to carry on its path) The simulation is done with 1200 agents following the
11 myRole = REP RESEN T AT IV E; distribution shown on figure 2. We considered that a
12 ELSE IF myRole = REP RESEN T AT IV E THEN neighbor (related by a link) is a friend. We situate the
13 * I am a representative agent too: I enter in problem in space but we did not define any distance no-
14 * conflict with the other applicants to this role; tion between the agents. The distance is always equal
15 * an election will take place and the agent to 1, because the most important thing is the acquain-
16 * with the best score will remain in place. tance. The second snapshot of figure 3 shows the emer-
17 RepresentativeElectionProcedure() gent topology. The remaining number of links is about
18 ELSE IF neighborRepresentativeNumber=1 THEN a quarter of the initial total number of the experiment.
19 * One of our neighbors is representative: one This number of links is the one really used for seeking
20 * subjects oneself to its authority and this as we are going to explain in the following section.
21 * even if the organization is less effective
22 * than otherwise.
23 * One privileges, for the moment,
24 * stability to performance in the organization.
25 * One will await the member leaves
26 myRole = SIM P LEM EM BER;
27 ELSE
28 * There are, in our vicinity, several
29 * representatives: one becomes connection
30 * agent for these representatives
31 myRole = CON N ECT ION
32 ENDIF
33 ELSE Fig. 2. The initial social network structure
34 * One does not have a neighbor:
35 * one has no role any more
36 myRole = N OT HIN G
37 ENDIF
4. Skills or Information searching improvement
In numerous approaches using organizational struc-
tures for routing, the adaptivity depends on a config- 4.1. Optimizing requests using an extended-MWAC
uration sending frequency which allows nodes to ver- organized social network
ify the data of their neighbors and their routing table.
In our case, the organization is modified only when a We have seen that the topology has an impact on
problem occurs but we do not try to maintain it if we the efficiency of tasks launched through the network
have no communication between agents. To achieve [15]. No agent has a global view of the network and
 Mercier et al. / Using multiagent self-organization techniques for seeking information in virtual social communities
Fig. 3. The simplified emergent social network structure
attempts to build one. Every agent in the network must
be able to launch a skill, service or information search,
and each request will use dynamically the network it-
self as a distributed database. We argue that such a dy-
namical decentralized approach is relevant in a context
where the network can be considered as infinite and
where the location of services is not stable.
Requests are launched on the network without any
synchronization with other members. The approach
imposes to adopt an asynchronous message exchange
technique implying message memorization.
msg ::=< id − msg, date, id − sender, id −
receiver, status, < content >>
with :
status ::= request|reply
and
content ::= [keyword]∗ |
id − req, id − req − sender,
id − service − owner, service_name
In order to avoid loops in message traffic each agent
keeps a trace of the received messages. If a message
has already been processed, it is forgotten (see figure
4).
To find nodes owning the right services or skills,
each node must be able to achieve some of the follow-
ing tasks:
– possessing the right service,
– knowing directly someone possessing the right
service,
– being able to relay the request to another member
pursuing the search (routing the request).
Moreover, agents own data depending on its role :
7
Fig. 4. Message processing decision cycle in an agent
– A group representative agent has some informa-
tion on the neighboring group and other represen-
tative agents. They have a connection agent circu-
lar list for each neighboring group.
– A group connection agent has some information
on the neighboring group representative.
– A simple member, as any agent, has a neighbors’
table with the identifiers of the members, their
role and their group number.
4.2. Experiments
After having built an initial topology using the
MWAC mechanisms detailed previously, the aim is to
use the network to search services, skills or informa-
tions. Here are the experimental conditions and some
results. The simulator allows to determine the popu-
lation of N agents and the number of S services pro-
vided by each agent.
Simulation 1 Each agent provides only one service
which is unique in the system. Every 200 milliseconds,
a randomly chosen agent looks for a service selected at
random. This simulation is done on a population of 600
agents. Figure 5 shows the configuration in the MASH
simulator.
Simulation 2 We affect each agent 10 services cho-
sen from a set of 50 services. The simulation parame-
ter is the agent population size. Simulation 2 which is
launched on a population of 100, 300 and 600 agents.
Every 15 seconds, all the agents (at the same time) look
for 5 services, then for 10, 15 and 20 services.
The objective is to minimize the number of mes-
sages circulating between the members for a service
search. The efficiency of the approach is compared to
8 Mercier et al. / Using multiagent self-organization techniques for seeking information in virtual social communities
Fig. 5. Configuration example with MASH tool for simulation 1
a Time To Live flooding technique (TTL) classically
used for Internet network routing. This method is a so-
lution to deal with large graphs (or networks) like the
Internet. What we call flooding TTL is a flood which
seeks hop by hop. If you cannot find what you are look-
ing for at a hop, you go to the second hop and so on.
On average everything is located at less than five hops.
Fig. 6. Skills searching experimentation results - Data volume ex-
change for simulation 1 and simulation 2
We express the benefit by calculating the ratio be-
tween the total number of messages relayed to identify
a service (and not all the members that have the ser-
vice) using extended-MWAC and TTL flooding solu-
tions. So the evaluation criteria is based on the volume
of transmitted messages used to access a service or a
skill.
Interesting results since MWAC uses up to hundred
times less accumulated volume of messages are shown
in figures 6 and 7. Figure 6 shows the accumulated
volume of data exchanged in the system for doing the
search. There is a population of 600 agents, the TTL
method consumes more volume of data, 2 Go in simu-
lation 1a (resp. 6 Go in simulation 2c) than the MWAC
method with 0.6 Go (resp. 1.8 Go).
At the beginning, the TTL method is better than
ours because the MWAC-extended method consumes
a large volume of messages "lost" to build the auto-
organized multiagents system. But the MWAC-extended
method quickly becomes more efficient than TTL after
this first step. In all the experiments, it consumes less
data than in the TTL method. For example, in simula-
tion 2d (see Fig. 7), the ratio is about 6.2 for a popula-
tion of 100 agents, 3.5 for 300 agents and 4.1 for 600
agents. Moreover, the MWAC-extended method resists
to the load because when the number of members and
launched services increase the ratio continues to be
better than that of the TTL method. This is because
the load is distributed on the representative agents af-
fecting the research and on the connectors that com-
municate between groups: a member is only devoted
to reply to the request so it is more efficient to provide
services.
Fig. 7. Skills searching experimentation results - Ratio for simula-
tion 1 and simulation 2
 Mercier et al. / Using multiagent self-organization techniques for seeking information in virtual social communities 9

Increasing the number of agents has two major ef-

fects on the social network. It can increase (1) the agent
density of neighborhood and (2) the mean number of
hops to find piece of information.
In the first case, the principle of the flooding technique
is that the information research queries are broadcast
by all the neighbors to their own neighbors (while in-
formation are not found). The network load will then
be significantly increased. In the case of the extended-
MWAC approach, the number of representative agents
is nearly the same: it is the number of their neighbored
simple member agent which is increased. These agents
donŠt retransmit the request and then the gain in vol-
ume of transmitted message is quite significant.
In the second case, using the flooding technique, the
TTL used to find information will be increased and the
network load is then highly increased. With extended-
MWAC the mean number of used representative agents
is higher but, because the simple member agents donŠt
retransmit the queries, the gain is interesting.

5. Deployment

Let us consider a use case to show how our model

can be deployed as a social software. Let us assume
that the software is deployed in a company internal net-
work and data access between centers is connected to
the Internet and protected by VPN tubes. Employees
use this application to create, access and update their
profiles which represent their own skills and activities
in the company.
Even if it is not often encountered today, (since so-
cial network platforms are centralized), we choose to
consider a decentralized configuration, because it is a
trend as a trend in social networks [24]. Since real de-
centralized social network systems are very difficult to
find. The architecture is deployed on a small scale ex-
perimental network.
The profile data of members are localized in databases.
Profiles can be stored together on a centralized local
database as they normally are today (site A). Profiles
can be nomadic too and embedded on mobile devices
(site B).
Figure 8 proposes an example of architecture mixing
these two extreme configurations to show how the con-
tribution can cover the different possible cases. How-
ever, this remains a case study and parts of these con-
figurations should be reused in hybrid network archi-
tectures.
Fig. 8. Architecture for the use case
A LAN provides both traditional networks where
clients and servers are connected by wired connec-
tion (site A) and wireless networks (site B). For secu-
rity concerns, firewalls are installed in each site access
point.
For geographical reasons or because of the parti-
tioning between activity domain, the data may be dis-
tributed on several sub-networks so we can have mul-
tiple configurations like site A and B in the company
network.
The function to search skills uses the MWAC ser-
vices in case of site A or MWAC solution embedded
on the client in the other cases.
The software deployed on the client has two main
functions. Firstly, a module dedicated to creating, ac-
cessing and updating members’ profiles communicates
with the data storage. Secondly, a module dedicated to
10 Mercier et al. / Using multiagent self-organization techniques for seeking information in virtual social communities
searching skills on the network uses the MWAC solu-
tion and reads the data storage.
In the case of site A, the search module uses the
MWAC service deployed on the local server and also
accesses the data storage in the internal network. If
members’ neigborhood needs to go through the Inter-
net, a VPN tube is used to access information on the
company other sites. In the case of site B or if the mem-
ber is out of the corporate network (at home, in a part-
ner company), the MWAC solution is embedded in the
client application but is only used when members carry
out a search.
By integrating MWAC solution in the search mod-
ule, the information may be accessed step by step in-
dependently for its location. Figure 9 shows the logical
architecture including the available exchange links.
Fig. 9. Logical architecture
A mock up has been studied to show the feasi-
bility. It has to be improved to be integrated as a
real social software tool. We choose to implement
the MWAC model as a message oriented middleware
service distributed among the nodes. The agent uses
a MWACCommunication package, written in Java
language. Among the MWACCommunication pack-
age included classes, there are two abstract classes
(Identifier and SkillDescriptor) and one
main class called SkillsManager.
In the SkillDescriptor abstract class the de-
signer must implement the primitives to define and
compare skills. In the Identifier abstract class,
the designer must implement the type of identifier
and the comparison primitive. The SkillsManager
contains a list of SkillDescriptor attached to the
associated employee. A method of the SkillsManager
allows to know if the employee has a specific skill.
The component must be connected to the application
which must give the identifier (name of the employee)
and its skills. MWAC can be directly connected to the
database using the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)
API. A method is available in SkillsManager to
find specific skills.
6. Conclusion
This paper proposed a model as a basis for an inno-
vative social software for services or skills seeking in
social network tools. The main idea was to make an on-
line analysis of the network to find interesting nodes,
using non explicit groups on-demand emergence to
manage the search process.
The advantages of this approach, using an adapta-
tion of the MWAC model, are: (1) the local vision of
the network, (2) the independence of nodes (allowing
a physical decentralization), (3) the absence of defi-
nitely defined paths to take into account user prefer-
ences and available members skills which can evolve
rapidly. We presented a symbolic model but formal ex-
pression can easily be built from the MWAC formal de-
scription [20]. The implemented simulator allowed us
to make an evaluation comparatively to currently used
techniques. Minimizing the number of visited nodes
aims at improving the search activity efficiency and
thus to enhance the quality of service.
To improve the model, an idea would be the trans-
position of this MAS model to a semantic level. In a
first phase, the model can be improved by:
– introducing semantic information in the choice of
receiver,
– completing the friend definition by limiting it to
a given subject by envisaging valuation of the re-
lation defined according to dedicated themes or
interests for example,
– adding a memory of requested keywords with the
recipients having declared their interests,
– introducing recursion in the multiagent model to
improve efficiency and representation.
With the introduction of semantics in the model, we
will be able to focus on the service relevance and not
only on searching the service. Like in information re-
trieval, a dynamic score, based on semantic informa-
tion, should be calculated for each agent’s service and
should be used to choose the way to the best service or
skill in the social network.
This work could finally be the basis for further appli-
cations. Considering the social networks from an arti-
ficial angle, this approach can be used for web services
 Mercier et al. / Using multiagent self-organization techniques for seeking information in virtual social communities
discovery. By exploiting the requests in an adapted
way, and by using the recursion properties, it can be
extended towards a tool useful to cartography and to
visualize large social networks.
Acknowledgement
A part of this research is supported by the Web Intel-
ligence Project of the Research Cluster ISLE of Region
Rhone-Alpes, France.
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