Specifying Agent Support for Collaboration

Adoption of leading edge collaborative technologies requires considerable facilitation. There are two options to provide such support. The most common is by special human coordination roles. Another is by software agents. The paper describes a method to provide facilitation using software agents. It emphasizes the need to develop reusable agents and proposes an ontology as a basis for discovering such reusable agents. It then describes a framework for developing agents with increasing collaborative capabilities and describes a prototype implementation.