A Formal Definition of Culture of a Set of Agents: The Version without States

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. Most current approaches to the development of systems for online communities implement some pre-defined culture rather than supporting the actual culture of the community for which the system is being developed. This technical report presents a formal definition of culture of a set of agents. Our definition covers many previous definitions existing in anthropology, and it can be used to model the culture of online communities. This is the first version of the formalism and it 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).