COMMUNICATING KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS: Part II—Big Talk among Small Systems

Abstract

A new model is introduced for describing societies of communicating knowledge systems from an artificial intelligence perspective. The society is defined as a time-evolving concept con-taining both static and dynamic knowledge. The static knowledge includes the components of the society, namely the actor types, the communication issue types, and the behavior pattern types. The dynamic knowledge specifies how the society can evolve. Each component is a metatheory described using a specific representation system. The metatheories representing the actor types include self-knowledge, knowledge about other actors, and knowledge about the real world. The communication issues always reflect the knowledge of the sending actor and produce some effect on the receiving actor, for instance, enrichments of its knowledge or conflicts with its own knowledge. Conflicts are of two forms: routine conflicts to be solved by mediating actors with no intelligent knowledge, or conflicts that require intelligent knowledge. and that must be solved by special actors called managers. Behavior pattern rules are theories that express cause-effect rules regarding the society behavior as a whole. Technically, modifications of the society are defined as parameterized theories whose argument specifies the requirements to be satisfied before a change of the situation and whose body introduces the modifications to be performed.