An agent development framework based on social positions

We present an approach based on the concepts of roles, skills and social positions to enhance and support the interaction between users within social environments. It advocates the use of artificial agent societies as a complement to human societies and assumes that agents would need to join such a society´ in order to realise user goals. A user´s agent would apply to join a society under a certain social position; acceptance of the application would result in a number of roles and skills to be added to it. This work is a more detailed description of the framework presented in Leakas, G. and Stathis, K. (2003).