Agents for establishing ad hoc cross-organizational teams

Ad hoc cross-agency teams are often needed to deal with actual, imminent, or potential crises involving multiple geographic/political jurisdictions or requiring coordinated expertise from organizations with different responsibilities. Our initial ontology-based, policy-driven version of personal agents and agent-based work flows and Web services facilitates the establishment of such teams. The agents and services use and augment the existing email and office automation applications of an organization. Preliminary results indicate a potential reduction of two orders of magnitude in the time needed to form a team.