Ontology-Services to Facilitate Agents' Interoperability

Ontology has an important role in Multi-Agent Systems communication once it provides a vocabulary to be used in the communication between agents. It is hard to find out two agents using precisely the same vocabulary. They usually have a heterogeneous private vocabulary defined in their own private ontology. In order to provide help in the conversation among different agents, we are proposing what we call ontology-services to facilitate agents’ interoperability. More specifically, in the context of the work we are doing, we intend to include these ontology-services in the framework of an Electronic Institution. Our ontology-based services will be provided through such an Electronic Institution and will be responsible for providing structural and semantic relationships between different vocabularies, useful advices on how to negotiate specific items, leading to appropriate conversations and making agreements