An Anthropological Approach to the Discovery of Ontologies in Multi-agent Societies

We presented our approach to ascription of intensional ontologies to societies of agents at UKMAS-99. The idea of an intensional ontologies is based on a pragmatic theory of intensionality. The work we presented included a mechanism for retrieving taxonomical relations from the intensional ontologies. Both the process of ascription of ontologies and the retrieval of taxonomical relations were inspired by work on cultural anthropology. These ideas were formalised using a framework for the specification of agent theories based on the Z language. This paper reviews the main ideas of that work and introduces a new application: extracting ontologies from text corpora.