Reinterpretation with Systems of Spheres

Communicating agents in open environments such as the semantic web face the problem of inter-ontological ambiguity, i.e., the problem that some agent uses a (constant, role or concept) name differently than another agent. In this paper, we propose a strategy for online ambiguity resolution relying on the ideas of belief revision and reinterpretation. The data structures guiding the conflict resolution are systems of spheres, which, in particular, allow to select a resolution result amongst other potential results. The paper defines operators for (iterated) reinterpretation based on systems of spheres and shows that they fulfill some desirable set of properties (postulates).