Agents in a multi-cultural world: Towards ontological reconciliation

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 ben..