How Bee-Like Agents Support Cultural Heritage

摘要

Elderly people are a great repository of knowledge, the majority of which has never been gathered by formal means. In this paper we introduce an application of multi-agent systems to support knowledge acquisition from this rich repository knowledge which is only available from elderly and experienced people. Our system provides the opportunity to complement different versions of the same knowledge produced in an extensive geographical and cultural region with the main objective of supporting Cultural Heritage. Users without much technological knowledge can search or leave information about some type of knowledge. Then, the system behaves like a swarm of bees, in this way the bee-like agents process the user contributions and the knowledge emerges from the system. Queen-like agents, honey-bee, drones and foragers have different roles inside the hive: looking for information resemblances, computing information confidence, checking the necessity of knowledge validation, and updating user's reliability. The system's feasibility has been tested on the specific area of ethnobotany, which concerns the ways in which specific societies name and classify plants.