Introduction. Decentralization and openness are inherent properties of multiagent systems (MAS). The technologies they provide are thus the right abstraction for developing Web-oriented applications. Moreover, di erent works have been proposed to use Semantic Web technologies (SWT) for representing various dimensions of MAS (e.g., interaction protocols, norms, organizations). Given these facts, we think it is time to go a step further by integrating SWT and MAS in order to improve reusability of data, knowledge, coordination strategies, etc. on the Web and across systems. In this paper, we take a rst step in this direction by proposing a semantic description of multi-agent organizations, showing the bene t regarding integration with Web ontologies. Position. The Web is pervasive, populated with data, services, people and things, connected to each other, based on Web Standards. In such an environment, knowledge and semantic technologies become a necessity and a reality. Indeed, the Semantic Web has seen an increasing use not only for Web applications but in many areas of computer sciences. It encourages uniformity of data formats, as well as modularization and reuse of speci cations (ontologies), by making it possible for ontologies to include and refer to information provided by other ontologies. Consequently, recent research in MAS have seen an intensive use of Knowledge representation together with increasing use of SWT. We envision that SWT will ultimately play a central role in all parts of MAS. Thus far, work combining MAS and SWT have only been concerned about addressing one dimension of MAS at a time. Also, they were mostly tackling the agent [6, 4] and interaction dimensions [10, 1] to ease communications, especially on domain knowledge. Other works have used those technologies to model part of the organization structure [8], norms and commitment [3], reputation [7] and more. The situation shows that it is time to go beyond these ad hoc solutions and integrate the pieces into a complete Semantic-Web-based infrastructure. We observe too that none of the mentioned contributions were really taking advantage of the Web aspect of these technologies, except some Web service integration. We want to provide the speci cations as Web data as well, such that agents can uniformly query and reason about agent systems, Web services, data and ontologies. Semantic Web technologies and Multi-Agent Organizations. We made a step in this direction, focusing on the organizational aspect of MAS, which has
been little addressed, although human organizations are of prominent interest
to the Semantic Web community [
Conclusion. MAS are increasingly interacting with the Web and we expect this to require the use of (1) Web standards and (2) semantic technologies. Therefore we want to encourage the use of SWT to enable the next generation of MAS. We contributed to this overall goal by providing an ontology for organization speci cations. 3 http://purl.org/NET/maorg/moise