Formal Knowledge Management in Distributed Environments

In order to address problems stemming from the dynamic nature of distributed systems, there is a need to be able to express the often neglected notions of the evolution and change of the knowledge components of such systems. This need becomes more pressing when one considers the potential of the Internet for distributed knowledge-based problem solving — and the pragmatic issues surrounding knowledge integrity and trust this raises. In this paper, we introduce a formal calculus for describing transformations in the ‘lifecycles’ of knowledge components, along with ideas about the nature of distributed environments in which the ideas underpinning the calculus can be realised. The formality and level of abstraction of this language encourages the analysis of knowledge histories and allows useful properties about this knowledge to be inferred. These ideas are illustrated through the discussion of a particular case-study in knowledge evolution.