Ontology management in multi-agent system for knowledge logistics

Knowledge is a critical resource for any activity. Current trends require using a global information environment, including end-users and loosely coupled knowledge sources (experts, knowledge bases, repositories, documents, etc.) for decision making. The vast diversity of the knowledge source management tools has made the problem of knowledge fusion from actual distributed knowledge sources. Knowledge logistics assumes presence of fusion processes. The knowledge fusion approach implies integration of knowledge from different sources (probably, heterogeneous) into a combined resource in order to complement insufficient knowledge and obtain a new knowledge. The multi-agent approach based on ontologies as a common manner of knowledge representation is described in the paper.