Using OWL 2 DL for Expressing ACL Content and Semantics

The design and implementation of open interaction systems is widely recognized to be a crucial issue in the development of innovative applications on the Internet. In this paper we pursue the goal of enhancing interoperability and openness in open interaction systems by systematic use of web standards. We propose a way of using the semantic web language OWL 2 DL to represent both the content of an ACL message, whose structure is compatible with FIPA-ACL, and the meaning of the whole message, adopting a commitment-based semantics, in such a way that OWL reasoning on message meaning is made possible. To this purpose we specify a number of ACL conventions regarding the domain independent components of the content language and the semantics of messages; we describe a set of supporting OWL ontologies, and exemplify our proposal with the analysis of a commissive message: a promise to perform a certain action within a given deadline if certain conditions hold. We then describe a demonstrative prototype of a system where those conventions are concretely implemented that is based on Web Service technologies (WSDL, SOAP, and HTTP for message transport).