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Nowadays, the increase in information and in sources from which to obtain knowledge have generated a large-scale development of knowledge sharing systems. However, these systems do not always live up to the expectations of the organisations that use them, as they do not take the fundamental social aspects necessary for the flow and sharing of knowledge between the members of a community into consideration. The objective of our work is to emulate the behaviour of communities of practice, where the confidence that exists between the members of these communities leads to an exchange of knowledge. We have, therefore, designed a three-level multi-agent architecture which takes into account both the way in which a community member behaves and the community to which that member belongs.

One technique with which to foster knowledge reuse in organizations is that of Communities of Practice where the feeling of trust between members is highly important in the sharing and reuse of knowledge. However, CoPs members are currently often geographically distributed, which decreases this feeling of trust. It is consequently more difficult for them to know how trustworthy a fellow-member is. This work attempts to assist CoPs members in deciding what or who to trust. One contribution of this work is a trust model which takes into account certain factors that human beings consciously or unconsciously use when they have to decide whether or not to trust in something or somebody. Moreover, in order to illustrate how the model can be used, a tool with which to recommend documents is described.Communities of Practice, Trust model, Multi-agent Systems, Knowledge Management.