Ontological Stratification in an Ecology of Infohabitants

Keywords: This paper reports progress from the EEII research project where ontological stratification is applied in the study of openness. We explain a stratification approach to reduce the overall complexity of conceptual models, and to enhance their modularity. A distinction is made between ontological and epistemological stratification. The application of the stratification approach to agent system design is explained and illustrated. A preliminary characterization of the relevant strata is given. The wider relevance of this result for information infrastructure design is addressed: ontological stratification will be key to the model management and semantic interoperability in a ubiquitous and model driven information infrastructure. 1. INTRODUCTION Agent system research and development has become an active field. There are many examples of using agent systems to solve tasks in so various areas as electronic commerce [1,2], control [3], communication and networks [4], resource management [5], search and information retrieval [6], etc. On the other hand, the novelty and at the same time immaturity of the existing results hinders introduction of agent systems into real life applications. One of the major reasons for that is the fact that most of the research efforts are concentrated on designing agents, components of agents,