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Ontologies for Agents: Theory and Experiences
July 1, 2005
There is a growing interest in the use of ontologies for multi-agent system applications. On the one hand, the agent paradigm is successfully employed in those applications where autonomous, loosely-coupled, heterogeneous, and distributed systems need to interoperate in order to achieve a common goal. On the other hand, ontologies have established themselves as a powerful tool to enable knowledge sharing, and a growing number of applications have benefited from the use of ontologies as a means to achieve semantic interoperability among heterogeneous, distributed systems. In principle, ontologies and agents are a match made in heaven, which has failed to happen. What makes a simple piece of software an agent is its ability to communicate in a ”social” environment, to make autonomous decisions, and to be proactive on behalf of its user. Communication ultimately depends on understanding the goals, preferences, and constraints posed by the user. Autonomy is the ability to perform tasks with little or no user intervention, while proactiveness involves acting autonomously with no need for user prompting. Communication, but also autonomy and proactiveness, depend on knowledge. The ability to communicate depends on understanding the syntax (terms and structure) and the semantics of a language. Ontologies provide the terms used to describe a domain and the semantics associated with them. In addition, ontologies are often complemented by some logical rules that constrain the meaning assigned to the terms. These constraints are represented by inference rules that can be used by agents to perform the reasoning on which autonomy and proactiveness are based.
Part of the book series: Whitestein Series in Software Agent Technologies and Autonomic Computing
Book
Springer
Whitestein Series in Software Agent Technologies
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