An Approach to Enterprise Collaboration through Concurrent Scene Understanding and Interoperation

Some aspects of the nature of enterprises are described, and some steps towards a formal theory of enterprises are made. An approach to defining an enterprise considers it as being the set of all members which comprise it. In its simplest form a member of an enterprise may be identified with its spatial location, or, more accurately, with its spatial extent. Elaborations of this approach consider the material possessions of an enterprise and also the dynamic nature of an enterprise. Within the framework of this theory a description of the method by which enterprises may collaborate is provided. One may consider teams of agents associated with each enterprise which exchange and interpret communications from the various enterprises. As part of this process it may be beneficial to use scene understanding systems in which the operations of segmentation and classification are carried out concurrently.