Do you speak my language? Knowledge challenges in open environments

Abstract

In the past 30 years there has been a paradigmatic change in modelling, sharing and utilising knowledge from the perspective of centralised, controlled systems, to that of open, dynamic environments. This has been fueled mainly by advances and the ubiquity of the prototypical open environment - ldquoThe Webrdquo, and the increasing need for managing entities in such distributed systems. However, for these changes to occur, we need to revisit many of the underlying assumptions that have formed the basis of Knowledge Sharing, and examine how they relate to the notion of distribution. Likewise, to facilitate adaptation to changes in open environments, autonomy must be considered as assumptions relating to human intervention and offline changes are relaxed. In this paper we examine the challenges of sharing knowledge in distributed, dynamic open environments, and illustrate with examples of how independent but intelligent agents can reach consensus dynamically.