Combing ontologies in settings with multiple agents - Invited talk

Abstract

Combining knowledge and beliefs of autonomous peers in distributed settings, is a major challenge. In this talk we consider agents that combine their ontologies and reason jointly with their coupled knowledge using the E - SHIQ representation framework. We motivate the need for a representation framework that allows agents to combine their knowledge in different ways, maintaining the subjectivity of their own knowledge and beliefs, and to reason collaboratively, constructing a tableau that is distributed among them. The talk presents the E - SHIQ representation framework and the tableau reasoning algorithm. It presents the implications to the modularization of ontologies for efficient reasoning, implications to coordinating agents' subjective beliefs, as well as challenges for reasoning with ontologies in open and dynamic multi-agent systems. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.