=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Integrating Semantic Web Technologies and Multi-Agent Systems: A Semantic Description of Multi-Agent Organizations
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-918/111110296.pdf
|volume=Vol-918
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/at/ZarafinZB12
}}
==Integrating Semantic Web Technologies and Multi-Agent Systems: A Semantic Description of Multi-Agent Organizations==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-918/111110296.pdf
Integrating Semantic Web technologies and
Multi-Agent Systems: a Semantic Description of
Multi-Agent Organizations?
Alexandra-Mădălina Zarafin1 and Antoine Zimmermann2 and Olivier Boissier2
1
University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania
2
École Nationale Supérieure des Mines, FAYOL-ENSMSE, LSTI, F-42023
Saint-Étienne, France
Introduction. Decentralization and openness are inherent properties of multi-
agent systems (MAS). The technologies they provide are thus the right abstrac-
tion for developing Web-oriented applications. Moreover, different works have
been proposed to use Semantic Web technologies (SWT) for representing vari-
ous 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 first step in this direc-
tion by proposing a semantic description of multi-agent organizations, showing
the benefit 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 environ-
ment, knowledge and semantic technologies become a necessity and a reality.
Indeed, the Semantic Web has seen an increasing use not only for Web applica-
tions but in many areas of computer sciences. It encourages uniformity of data
formats, as well as modularization and reuse of specifications (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 en-
vision 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 do-
main 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 inte-
grate 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 specifications 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
?
AT2012, 15-16 October 2012, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Copyright held by the author(s).
been little addressed, although human organizations are of prominent interest
to the Semantic Web community [9]. We used OWL to make an ontology of the
organizational specification of the MOISE model [5], taking analysis of [2] as
a basis. A given organization is described in RDF by instantiating the classes
of the main ontology. The specification is made available at a SPARQL query
endpoint, provided by an organizational artifact, so that agents who need to
enter the organization can ask for relevant information on, e.g., roles or goals.
Interestingly, agents can combine this with other data sources on the Web, us-
ing the same query language and protocol. Moreover, the specification can be
combined with the agent’s knowledge, who can specify constraining axioms in
OWL (e.g., agents with whom I’m working must be disjoint from my friends)
to detect undesired situations with consistency checks. Following Semantic Web
good practices, we designed the ontology modularly and made it available on-
line3 . To allow compatibility with the existing implementation of MOISE, we
implemented a two-way transformation.
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
specifications.
References
1. OWL-DL as a FIPA-ACL content language. In Proc. of FOCA 2006, 2006.
2. L. Coutinho, J. Sichman, and O. Boissier. Modelling Dimensions for Agent Or-
ganizations. In Handbook of Research on Multi-Agent Systems: Semantics and
Dynamics of Organizational Models, pages 18–50. 2009.
3. N. Fornara and M. Colombetti. Representation and monitoring of commitments
and norms using OWL. AI Comm., 23(4):341–356, 2010.
4. M. Hadzic, E. Chang, and P. Wongthongtham. Ontology-Based Multi-Agent Sys-
tems. Springer, 2009.
5. J. Hübner, J. Sichman, and O. Boissier. A Model for the Structural, Functional,
and Deontic Specification of Organizations in Multiagent Systems. In Proc. of
SBIA 2002, pages 118–128, 2002.
6. T. Klapiscak and R. Bordini. JASDL: A Practical Programming Approach Com-
bining Agent and Semantic Web Technologies. In Proc. of DALT 2008, pages
91–110, 2009.
7. L. Nardin, A. Brandão, and J. Sichman. Experiments on semantic interoperabil-
ity of agent reputation models using the SOARI architecture. Eng. Appl. of AI,
24(8):1461–1471, 2011.
8. D. Okouya, L. Penserini, S. Saudrais, A. Staikopoulos, V. Dignum, and S. Clarke.
Designing MAS Organisation through an Integrated MDA/Ontology Approach. In
Proc. of TWOMDE 2008, pages 55–60, 2008.
9. D. Reynolds. An organization ontology - W3C Working Draft 05 April 2012.
Working draft, 2012. http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-vocab-org-20120405/.
10. Y. Zou, T. Finin, Y. Peng, A. Joshi, and R. S. Cost. Agent Communication in
DAML World. In Proc. of WRAC 2002, pages 347–354, 2002.
3
http://purl.org/NET/maorg/moise