Providing agent support for collaborative systems: using a domain oriented design method

This paper identifies an approach for designing software agents to support collaborative systems. It proposes that agent supported collaborative systems can be economically built using reusable agents. Such reusable agents must be based on concepts that can apply to a wide range of collaborative systems. To do this, it defines a collaborative metamodel to describe collaborative work and identifies generic agents based on the metamodel concepts. The paper then describes a methodology that defines systems as object models in terms of the metamodel concepts. It then supports each object with the corresponding agent.