Oops... definition of social agent

The good news is that somehow, I have managed to be result #1 in Google for the term social agent. The bad news is that my Web page that purports to define that term simply said "A social agent is ... TBD." How lame! DOH! That page has gotten a fair number of hits, probably mostly by academic researchers in software agent technology and their students. One finally sent me an email sarcastically complimenting me for saving him so much effort and that my mother should be proud of me. Well, I fixed the problem. I did some research and derived my own definition for the term social agent. Actually, there are two somewhat distinct uses:

• (1) A social agent is a software agent which exhibits a significant degree of interdependence with other software agents which results in or from the formation of communities of software agents within the full population of software agents to which the social agents belong, where each community has rules for behavior within the community.

• (2) A social agent is a software agent or robot which is capable of social communication with human beings.

See: http://www.agtivity.com/def/social_agent.htm

What is frustrating about this is that by failing to have a reasonable definition on that Web page I have been losing out on opportunities to be cited as a source for definition of that term. There is not even a Wikipedia article for it.

-- Jack Krupansky