  In this work, we present asynchronous multi-context systems (aMCSs), which
provide a framework for loosely coupling different knowledge representation
formalisms that allows for online reasoning in a dynamic environment. Systems
of this kind may interact with the outside world via input and output streams
and may therefore react to a continuous flow of external information. In
contrast to recent proposals, contexts in an aMCS communicate with each other
in an asynchronous way which fits the needs of many application domains and is
beneficial for scalability. The federal semantics of aMCSs renders our
framework an integration approach rather than a knowledge representation
formalism itself. We illustrate the introduced concepts by means of an example
scenario dealing with rescue services. In addition, we compare aMCSs to
reactive multi-context systems and describe how to simulate the latter with our
novel approach.
