Let's talk about our “being”: A linguistic-based ontology framework for coordinating agents

Issue title: Formal Ontologies for Communicating Agents

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Pazienza, Maria Teresa | Sguera, Savino | Stellato, Armando

Affiliations: DISP, University of Rome, Tor Vergata, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133 Rome, Italy | E-mail: {pazienza,stellato}@info.uniroma2.it | E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: In open scenarios, agents willing to cooperate must impact the communication barrier between them and their unknown partners. If agents are not relying on any agreement about the meaning they ascribe to the symbols used in the conversation, semantic misalignments will arise on the discourse domain as well, thus making the communication impossible. In wide and heterogeneous scenarios offered by the Web (and its newborn semantic incarnation), traditional and meaning-safe methodologies for communication need to keep abreast of new dynamic communicative interaction modalities. The uncertainties arising from communication between actors which base their behavior on different and heterogeneous knowledge models have to be taken into account, wisely balancing the extent of “reachable knowledge” with the trustworthiness of its information. Main objective of this work is to augment the FIPA Ontology Service Specification with linguistically-aware methodologies for communication, describing a wide-scope framework for multi-agent systems design, semantic integration and coordination.

Keywords: FIPA-compliant multi-agent systems, ontological primitives, semantic integration, linguistic resources

Journal: Applied Ontology, vol. 2, no. 3-4, pp. 305-332, 2007