o COMMUNICATING KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS: Part I-Big Talk among Small Systems CRISTINA SERNADAS Departmento de Matematica, Instituto Superior Iecnico, Universidade Iecnica de Lisboa, 1096 Lisboa Codex, Portugal HELDER COELHO Centro de Informatica, LNEC, 1799 Lisboa Codex, Portugal GRAl;A GASPAR DICC, Faculdade de Ciencias de Lisboa, 1300 Lisboa, Portugal A new model is imroduced for describing societies of communicating knowledge systems from an artificial intelligence perspective. The society is defined as a Time-evolving concept con- taining both static and dynamic knowledge. The static knowledge includes The components of The society, namely The actor Types, Thecommunication issue Types, and The behavior pattern Types. The dynamic knowledge specifies how The society can evolve. Each component is a metatheory described using a specific representation system. The metatheories representing The actor Types include self-knowledge, knowledge about other actors, and knowledge about The real world. The communication issues always reflect The knowledge of Thesending actor and produce some effect on The receiving actor.for instance. enrichments of its knowledge or conflicts with' iTS own knowledge. Conflias are of two forms: routine conflicts TO be solved by mediating actors wiTh no inre/ligenr knowledge. or conflicts that require intelligent knowledge and Thatmust be solved by special aaors called managers. Behavior pattern rules are Theo- ries that express cause-effect rules regarding The society behavior as a whole. Technically, modifications of The society are defined as parameterized Theories whose argument specifies The requirements To be satisfied before a change of the situation and whose body introduces The modifications TO be performed. INTRODUCTION The problem of communication between systems has been addressed in sev- eral areas of computing sciences, namely data communication, programming languages, distributed operating systems and services, distributed databases, and artificial intelligence. The main issue in the programming language area has been the identification Editor's Note: Becauseof the length of this paper. it has been divided into two parts. Part I comprises the first four sections, Part n the last two sections plus appendices. Part n will appear in volume I, issue 4. Applied Anificiallntelligence: 1:233-260, 1987 Copyright © 1987 by Hemisphere Publishing Corporation 233