Declarative Knowledge Updates Through Agents

Cooperative, intelligent agents often share a common knowledge which, in the presence of learning agents, is likely to be subject to change. In this paper, we describe a method to construct specialized agents that incorporate new information into a given body of knowledge. These update agents are based on established methods from logic programming and follow a declarative update policy in order to perform their tasks. The proposed update agents not only adhere to a clear semantics, but are also able to deal with incomplete or inconsistent information in an appropriate way. We outline a concrete realization of update agents in terms of the IMPACT agent system and briefly discuss possible applications.