Abstract
The past several years have witnessed a proliferation of information sources on the world-wide-web, and of information agents with widely varying specialties. The unmanageability of massive amounts of information is becoming apparent and is having an impact on professions that rely on distributed archived information.
Ontology negotiation is becoming increasingly recognized as a crucial element of scalable agent technology. This is because agents, by their very nature, are supposed to operate with a fair amount of autonomy and independence from their end-users. Part of this independence is the ability to enlist other agents for help in performing a task (such as locating information on the web). The agents enlisted for help may be "owned" by a different end-user or organization (such as a document archive), and there is no guarantee that they will use the same terminology or understand the same concepts (objects, operators, theorems, rules) as the recruiting agent.
For NASA, the need for ontology negotiation arises at the boundaries between scientific disciplines. For example: modeling the effects of global warming might involve knowledge about imaging, climate analysis, ecology, demographics, industrial economics, and biology. The need for ontology negotiation also arises at the boundaries between scientific programs. For example, a Principal Investigator may want to use information from a previous mission to complement downloads from the instruments currently deployed.
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Bailin, S.C., Truszkowski, W. (2003). Ontology Negotiation: How Agents Can Really Get to Know Each Other. In: Truszkowski, W., Hinchey, M., Rouff, C. (eds) Innovative Concepts for Agent-Based Systems. WRAC 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2564. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45173-0_24
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