  This paper describes a system developed to help people explore local
communities by providing navigation services in social spaces created by the
community members via communication and knowledge sharing. The proposed system
utilizes data of a community's social network to reconstruct the social space,
which is otherwise not physically perceptible but imaginary, experiential, yet
learnable. The social space is modeled with an agent network, where each agent
stands for a member of the community and has knowledge about expertise and
personal characteristics of some other members. An agent can gather
information, using its social "connections", to find community members most
suitable to communicate to in a specific situation defined by the system's
user. The system then deploys its multimodal interface, which "maps" the social
space onto a representation of the relevant physical space, to locate the
potential interlocutors and advise the user on an efficient communication
strategy for the given community.
