Shine: a peer-to-peer based framework of network community support systems

A discussion is presented on Shine, a framework of communication systems that support network communities. Shine provides a unified structural design approach to various network community support systems and enables them to share software components and cooperate with each other. Furthermore, Shine has a peer-to-peer architecture, which enables personal agents to form communities suitable for each user by exchanging data in a peer-to-peer style. These features of Shine are described and its effectiveness as a framework is verified by applying it to several systems.