Ayllu: Architecture for collaboration in a distributed environment

In many domains, human interaction is a key aspect. Collaboration platforms have been proposed to support cooperation between people, however it is not easy to incorporate at the same time aspects as: semantic and structured communication, people diversity, adaptation to the context, group awareness, and resource management in a distributed and mobile environment. The Ayllu model for collaboration uses software agents as mediators between people that behave as cooperative rational agents. This approach has the advantage of making interactions semantic oriented and properly structured by the use of well-defined interaction protocols. However, for real world situations, these features are not enough to support the requirements of group work. In this paper, the complete general Ayllu architecture for collaboration is presented. This architecture, not only includes components to apply the Ayllu cooperative approach, but also to provide personalization, context adaptation, awareness, and resource management. All the components have been designated to work in a coherent way in a distributed cooperative environment. The Ayllu platform is designed to be a general collaboration framework that can be easily adapted for specific domains; in this paper the case of study is the education one.