Abstract
Globalization makes culture no more bound to a geographical area, race or religion as was previously considered in anthropology. With the advent of Web 2.0 it becomes appropriate to speak about the culture of online communities in general, without specific ties to country or nation. Multi-national companies, software developers, scientists need to take into account cultural differences when delivering products to people. The first step in dealing with culture consists in defining and representing culture of the targeted community. AI literature addressed issues of sociality, collaboration, and coordination in agent societies, but did not target the problem of defining and representing culture of a community. This chapter presents a formal definition of culture of a set of agents. The proposed definition generalizes existing definitions of culture and it is operational in the sense that it can be applied for characterization and comparison of culture(s) existing in various communities. The main focus of this chapter is on the first version of the formalism that does not introduce states. However, representing a snapshot of the culture in a certain moment is the first step towards a more complex formalism that includes states (the work on the latter is ongoing and we present only preliminary definitions here).
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Notes
- 1.
Traits are further grouped in featuresin Axelrod’s formulation, i.e. each feature can take value from a set of specific traits.
- 2.
Of course, we present a simplified example here, real users and groups on CiteULike have much more papers in their bibliographies.
- 3.
For instance, Google Chrome browser includes tabbed browsing from the first release.
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We would like to thank Stefano Borgo for suggestions he provided for improving the formalism.
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Birukou, A., Blanzieri, E., Giorgini, P., Giunchiglia, F. (2013). A Formal Definition of Culture. In: Sycara, K., Gelfand, M., Abbe, A. (eds) Models for Intercultural Collaboration and Negotiation. Advances in Group Decision and Negotiation, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5574-1_1
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