Tools for Conviviality in Multi-Context Systems

A common feature of many distributed systems, including web social networks, peer-to-peer systems and Ambient Intelligence systems, is cooperation in terms of information exchange among heterogeneous entities. In order to facilitate the exchange of information, we first need ways to evaluate it. The concept of conviviality was recently proposed for modeling and measuring cooperation among agents in multiagent systems. In this paper, we introduce conviviality as a property of Multi-Context Systems (MCS). We first present how to use conviviality to model and evaluate interactions among different contexts, which represent heterogeneous entities in a distributed system. Then, as one cause of logical conflicts in MCS is due to the exchange of information between mutually inconsistent contexts, we show how inconsistency can be resolved using the conviviality property. We illustrate our work with an example from web social networks.