A Formal Definition of Culture

Globalization makes culture no more bound to a geographical area, race or religion. 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. In this paper, we propose a formal definition of culture of a set of agents. It 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.