Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/93948

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Title

Agents in a multi-cultural world: towards ontological reconciliation

Author(s)

Lister, Kendall;  Sterling, Leon

Abstract

In order to function effectively, agents, whether human or software, must be able to communicate and interact through common understandings and compatible conceptualisations. In a multi-cultural world, ontological differences are a fundamental obstacle that must be overcome before inter-cultural communication can occur. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issues faced by agents operating in large-scale multi-cultural environments and to argue for systems that are tolerant of heterogeneity, illustrating the discussion with a running example of researching and comparing university web sites as a realistic scenario representative of many current knowledge management tasks that would benefit from agent assistance. We then discuss the efforts of the Intelligent Agent Laboratory toward designing such tolerant systems, giving a detailed presentation of the results of several implementations.

Publication type

Conference paper

Source

Lecture notes in computer science: advances in artificial intelligence: proceedings of the 14th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI 2001), Adelaide, South Australia, Australia, 10-14 December 2001 / M. Brooks, D. Corbett and M. Stumptner (eds.), Vol. 2256, pp. 321-332

Publication year

2001

Keyword(s)

Agents;  Cultures;  Multi-cultural environments;  Ontological reconciliation;  Ontologies;  Software

Publisher

Springer-Verlag

ISBN

9783540429609, 3540429603

Publisher URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45656-2_28

Copyright

Copyright © 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. Accepted manuscript reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.

Full text

Peer reviewed