Extending Ascribed Intensional Ontologies with Taxonomical Relations in Anthropological Descriptions of Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

The paper presents an approach to the description of ontologies used in Multi-Agent Systems as a means to allow interoperability of such systems. It is inspired by a pragmatic theory of intensionality worked out as part of an anthropological approach to agent migration. A new formalisation of how an intensional ontology can be ascribed to a society of agents is presented, together with a first formalisation of the recovery of taxonomical relations from such ontologies. This process of discovering taxonomies is inspired by ethnographic studies in social anthropology. The formalisations are developed using a framework for agent theories, based on the Z specification language. Further, the approach is illustrated by the ascription of an ontology and associated taxonomies for an exotic application: the game of cricket. Finally, several issues related to this approach are discussed.Interoperability of Multi-Agent Systems, Pragmatic Intensionality, Cultural Anthropology, Inference of Taxonomies