Ontology Enrichment in Multi Agent Systems Through Semantic Negotiation

Abstract

Ontologies play a key role in the development of Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) for the Semantic Web, providing conceptual description of the agents’ world. However, especially in open MASs, agents use different ontologies and this often leads to communication failures. Semantic negotiation is a recent framework which provides an effective solution to such a problem, but it is a too heavy framework to be implemented in large agent communities. In this paper, we deal with the inefficiency in semantic negotiations, and we show how a possible solution is to build a common representation of the different terms used by the agents. We argue that a reasonable compromise to use a common ontology consists of combining it with semantic negotiation and we propose an algorithm which implements this idea in the recent HISENE semantic negotiation framework. Moreover, the semantic negotiation is exploited, in our proposal, to dynamically enrich the global ontology.