Agent organization and communication with multiple ontologies

1997

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce ontology-centric knowledge organization approach to realize knowledge base system for sharing and reuse of knowledge. Since ontology is an intermediate level of information representation between the model and media level of information, it can work to bridge multiple models and multiple users. To share personal information among users, they must share their manners of conceptualization which form personal ontologies. Here we introduce two systems.

The Knowledge Engineering Review, 2002

This article presents and motivates an extended ontology knowledge model which represents explicitly semantic information about concepts. This knowledge model results from enriching the standard conceptual model with semantic information which precisely characterises the concept's properties and expected ambiguities, including which properties are prototypical of a concept and which are exceptional, the behaviour of properties over time and the degree of applicability of properties to subconcepts. This enriched conceptual model permits a precise characterisation of what is represented by class membership mechanisms and helps knowledge engineers to determine, in a straightforward manner, the meta-properties holding for a concept. Meta-properties are recognised to be the main tool for a formal ontological analysis that allows us to build ontologies with a clean and untangled taxonomic structure.This enriched semantics can prove useful to describe what is known by agents in a multi...

Proceedings ITCC 2003. International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing, 2003

Developing a knowledge-sharing capability across distributed heterogeneous data sources remains a significant challenge. Ontology-based approaches to this problem show promise by resolving heterogeneity, if the participating data owners agree to use a common ontology (i.e., a set of common attributes). Such common ontologies offer the capability to work with distributed data as if it were located in a central repository. This knowledge sharing may be achieved by determining the intersection of similar concepts from across various heterogeneous systems. However, if information is sought from a subset of the participating data sources, there may be concepts common to the subset that are not included in the full common ontology, and therefore are unavailable for knowledge sharing. One way to solve this problem is to construct a series of ontologies, one for each possible combination of data sources. In this way, no concepts are lost, but the number of possible subsets is prohibitively large. This paper describes a software agent case study that demonstrates a flexible and dynamic approach for the fusion of data across combinations of participating heterogeneous data sources to maximize knowledge sharing. The software agents generate the largest intersection of shared data across any selected subset of data sources. This ontology-based agent approach maximizes knowledge sharing by dynamically generating common ontologies over the data sources of interest. The approach was validated using data provided by five (disparate) national laboratories by defining a local ontology for each laboratory (i.e., data source). In this experiment, the ontologies are used to specify how to format the data using XML to make it suitable for query. Consequently, software agents are empowered to provide the ability to dynamically form local ontologies from the data sources. In this way, the cost of developing these ontologies is reduced while providing the broadest possible access to available data sources.

The Knowledge Engineering Review, 2002

It is now more than ten years since researchers in the US Knowledge Sharing Effort envisaged a future where complex systems could be built by combining knowledge and services from multiple knowledge bases and the first agent communication language, KQML, was proposed (Neches et al., 1991). This model of communication, based on speech acts, a declarative message content representation language and the use of explicit ontologies defining the domains of discourse (Genesereth & Ketchpel, 1994), has become widely recognised as having great benefits for the integration of disparate and distributed information sources to form an open, extensible and loosely coupled system. In particular, this idea has become a key tenet in the multi-agent systems research community.

Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2003

Knowledge is people's personal map of the world. According to the knowledge differences, it is possible different groups of people have different perceptions about the same reality. Each perception can be represented by using ontologies. In the research underlying this paper we are dealing with a multiple ontologies. In that context, each agent explores its own ontology. The goal of this research is to generate a common ontology including a common set of terms, based on the several ontologies available, in order to make possible to share the common terminology (set of terms) that it implements, between different communities. In this paper we are presenting a real implementation of a system using those concepts. The paper provides a case study involving groups of people in different communities, managing data using different perceptions (terminologies), and different semantics to represent the same reality. Each user belonging to a different community-uses different terminologies in collecting data and as a consequence they also get different results of that exercise. It is not a problem if the different results are used inside each community. The problem occurs if people need to take data from other communities, sharing, collaborating and using it to get a more global solution.

SITIS 2008 - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Signal Image Technology and Internet Based Systems, 2008

the work presented in this paper is related to the knowledge management. We aim to reuse knowledge during the design processes, in order to help designers in all the phases of the products design. We propose a reuse knowledge approach based on the assistance of the professional actors with an automatic push (proposition) of knowledge and ease pull (search) of knowledge by helping individual searches. This approach is based upon a Knowledge Reuse System (KRS) which takes into account the roles of the professional actors and their collaborations throughout the product design process in order to bring an automatic help to the actors.

2005

The work presented in this paper is an attempt to bridge two co-existing realties: Semantic Web and Multi-Agent Systems. Agents should be enhanced with tools and mechanisms in order to autonomously achieve this strategic and ambitious objective. In this paper we focus on what we consider the central issue when moving towards the vision of semantic multiagent systems: the ontology support. Due to the heterogeneity of resources available and roles played by different agents of a system, a one-level approach with the aim of being omni-comprehensive seems not to be feasible. In our opinion, a good compromise is represented by a two-level approach: a light ontology support embedded in each agent and one or more ontology servers providing a more expressive and powerful ontology support to the agents of the systems.

2003

The knowledge representation field is gaining momentum with the advent of the Semantic Web activity within the W3C. This working group, thanks to previous researches, has proposed the Ontology Web Language to enhance the expressivity of web pages and to allow semantic inferences. This paper argues that knowledge representation technologies should be core components of multi-agent platforms. In the first part of this paper, we introduce our agent model that relies on the notion of skill. Then, we identify several criteria that let us to believe that the Owl language should be used as a content language within Agent Communication Languages and also in the design of multi-agent platforms. In the last part, we discuss the conceptual and technological challenges that platform designers coming from the multi-agent field have to deal with when trying to integrate knowledge representation technologies.

International Journal of Electronic Government Research, 2008

A major performance factor when gathering information across a platform like the World Wide Web is the efficiency of the search and retrieval system. The effectiveness of current search and retrieval systems is restricted as they do not use the semantics of the data but only utilize keywords. Using a multi-agent system where agents gather information and organize it, creating ontologies, is a very viable approach to the problem. Major difficulties that arise during collaboration among such information-providing agents are ambiguity and data misinterpretation. This is due to the diversity of ontology creators, differences in linguistics, and ontological overlapping. Users may also knowingly or unknowingly add incorrect information to ontologies. Ontological mediation tries to address such collaboration issues relating to ambiguous and unfamiliar information arising due to various reasons. We propose a communication-based approach for ontological mediation. In the process, we also pre...