Modeling, extraction and reuse of organizational knowledge

Argues that multi-agent system design can be formalized by borrowing from artificial intelligence and software engineering concepts and techniques, such as ontologies, organization, decomposition and synthesis. We particularly focus on ontology sharing of software agents, define agencies as organizations of agents, propose a method to conceptualize the ontology of the domain using a multi-layered bipartite graph called a symbol structure (SS), and propose a method to extract organizational information from the SS of interacting agents. This information is then used in multi-agent system design and development