Towards reactive multi-context systems

Abstract

Among the challenges faced by the area of knowledge representation (KR) are the following ones: firstly, knowledge represented in different knowledge representation languages needs to be integrated, and secondly, certain applications have specific needs not typically fulfilled by standard KR systems. What we have in mind here are applications where reasoners, rather than being called by the user in order to answer some specific query, run online and have to deal with a continuous stream of information. In this paper we argue that multi-context systems (MCS) are adequate tools for both challenges. The original MCS approach was introduced to handle the integration problem in a principled way. A later extension to so-called managed MCS appears to provide relevant functionality for the second challenge. In this paper we review both MCS and managed MCS and discuss how the latter approach needs to be further developed for online applications. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.