Contextualizing Ontologies for Agents

It is well accepted that the usefulness of agents is enhanced by ontologies, but a common problem encountered by agents is the difficulty of accessing heterogenous ontologies. This problem is addressed by contextualizing ontologies, but how? We show how agents can contextualize ontologies that are represented using description logics. Several attempts have been made in addressing this contextualization problem, but we use the technique of the Tiered Logic Method (TLM) to build a system that is much simpler, more elegant, and easier to implement than existing technologies. Moreover, since TLM is a methodology it also has applications in other types of system. We sketch proofs of soundness, completeness and decidability for such a system, subject only to simple finiteness constraints, which would be satisfied in any practical case. Finally this method solves the problem of transitive subsumption propagation,which is still unaddressed by other well known proposals.