Authors:
Lito Perez Cruz
and
John Newsome Crossley
Affiliation:
Monash University, Australia
Keyword(s):
Agents, Logics for agent systems, Ontologies and agent systems, Description logic.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Distributed and Mobile Software Systems
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge Representation
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
MetaModeling
;
Models
;
Multi-Agent Systems
;
Networked Ontologies
;
Paradigm Trends
;
Software Engineering
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
It is well accepted that the usefulness of agents is enhanced by ontologies, but a common problem encountered by agents is the difficulty of accessing heterogenous ontologies. This problem is addressed by contextualizing ontologies, but how? We show how agents can contextualize ontologies that are represented using description logics. Several attempts have been made in addressing this contextualization problem, but we use the technique of the Tiered Logic Method (TLM) to build a system that is much simpler, more elegant, and easier to implement than existing technologies. Moreover, since TLMis a methodology it also has applications in other types of system. We sketch proofs of soundness, completeness and decidability for such a system, subject only to simple finiteness constraints, which would be satisfied in any practical case. Finally this method solves the problem of transitive subsumption propagation,which is still unaddressed by other well known proposals.