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In all of the preceding discussion of
knowledge required for multiagent event handling, much of what we have been
talking about can be described as contextual knowledge: knowledge of the
environmental, problem-solving, and social/cooperative context the agent is
in. Contextual knowledge is crucial in appropriately conditioning an agent's
behavior to the current problem-solving context. Contextual knowledge,
however, comes not only from the agent's sensor stream and messages received.
It also comes from the agent's knowledge about problem-solving situations in
general, which may be the product of its past experiences.
Elsewhere, we have discussed a mechanism for context-sensitive reasoning in
real-world domains [e.g.,]turner:cogsci89,turner93:ctx,turner:book,
including handling unanticipated events. We believe that this mechanism,
which relies on retrieving and merging contextual schemas into a coherent
picture of the current context, can be extended to facilitate multiagent event
handling as well.