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Representing and Communicating Context in Multiagent Systems

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Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9405))

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Abstract

Context-aware agents operating in a cooperative multiagent system (MAS) can benefit from establishing a shared view of their context, since this increases coherence and consistency in the system’s behavior. To this end, agents must share contextual knowledge with each other. In our prior work on context-mediated behavior, agents used frame-based contextual schemas (c-schemas) to explicitly represent and reason about context. While an expressively rich approach, the lack of formal structure poses problems for mutual understanding of c-schemas among agents in a MAS. As we are interested MASs with heterogeneous agents, not only will agents represent c-schemas in idiosyncratic ways, but the set of c-schemas known by each agent will differ. In this paper we propose a new, related representation of contextual knowledge using description logic and a shared ontology, and we present a technique for communicating contextual knowledge while respecting bandwidth limitations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The name seems appropriate, since just as a mascon is a concentration of mass that affects (e.g.) a satellite’s orbit, our approach relies on a concentration of contextual knowledge to affect a MAS’s behavior.

  2. 2.

    Sometimes written AUV \(\sqcap \) \(\exists \) hasColor.Yellow.

  3. 3.

    Structural subsumption is weaker than logical subsumption [1].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing and Information Science, University of Maine, Orono, ME, 04469, USA

    Sonia Rode & Roy M. Turner

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  1. Sonia Rode
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  2. Roy M. Turner
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Correspondence to Roy M. Turner .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

    Henning Christiansen

  2. ENS-Pavillon Jardin, CNRS-Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris, France

    Isidora Stojanovic

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, Aglantzia, Cyprus

    George A. Papadopoulos

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Rode, S., Turner, R.M. (2015). Representing and Communicating Context in Multiagent Systems. In: Christiansen, H., Stojanovic, I., Papadopoulos, G. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9405. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25591-0_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25591-0_19

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-25590-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-25591-0

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