Effective computations with distributed knowledge: the issue of compositionality and ontologies

We address the problem of collaboration between intelligent software systems with different competences across the Internet, focusing on some problems in the communication of knowledge between such systems. We point out the importance of exploiting the parallelism between knowledge communication amongst intelligent agents and that among people, exemplified by the compositionality principle and its importance in the engineering of knowledge communication languages, and by the computing-with-words paradigm and its importance in fuzzy systems. In this paper, we propose to exploit the parallelism in more detail, by employing the theory of categorial type logics (or more generally, of categorial grammars) in the design and implementation of symbolic knowledge communication languages and their fuzzy semantics for distributed knowledge-based systems.