The technology used in this paper supports the evolution and maintenance of a distributed collective memory for a community of heterogeneous agents who plan and work cooperatively. The collective memory of a community of agents is defined as the history of previous activities that will be used as a resource for future activities. It has been argued (Cole & Ergestrom,1992) that collective memory plays a central role in the development of distributed cooperative behavior.
The question of collective memory is to determine techniques for storing agent histories in the most useful manner for future problem-solving episodes, i.e. techniques for individual agents to effectively participate in the maintenance of a collective memory. We only discuss a purely distributed collective memory in this paper, but we are also interested in centralized (institutional) and hybrid organizations for collective memory.