Sharing Culture - Enabling technologies for Communication Support

In cyberworlds as well as in real world environmentsthere is a need to enable cooperation and communication.While IT support has enabled us to overcome the barriersof time and place in communication over distance, thereis still the problem of bridging the gap across differentcultures. In this paper we will study the possibility of ITsupport for "sharing culture", i.e. for communicationacross different cultures.Our attempt to realize this goal is the creation of alearning, proactive agent that keeps track of thecommunication in virtual environments. We try to supportthe communication partners during their interactions byproviding information based on the type and content ofthe communication. The information provided by theagent is based on cultural differences that could lead topotential misunderstandings within a communicationscenario.The idea is to design a pluggable agent to support cross-culturalcommunication for virtual communities indistributed environments.