Title: An approach for multi-agent coordination based on semantic approximation

Authors: Yinglong Ma, Shipeng Zhang, Yuancheng Li, Zheng Yi, Shaohua Liu

Addresses: School of Computer Science and Technology, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, P.R. China. ' School of Computer Science and Technology, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, P.R. China. ' School of Computer Science and Technology, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, P.R. China. ' School of Computer Science and Technology, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, P.R. China. ' International Research Lab, Telecommunication Engineering College, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, P.R. China

Abstract: Ontology plays an important role in multi-agent systems because it can provide and define a sharable semantic vocabulary. However, it is almost impossible for distributed web agents to completely share a same semantic vocabulary. Information incompleteness and semantic heterogeneity among distributed ontologies will make multi-agent communication rather difficult. In this paper, we exploit semantic approximation technologies for implementing better multi-agent communication based on partial shared distributed ontologies. Through approximate semantic coordination among multiple agents, we can further obtain effective semantic query results and achieve information sharing across distributed ontologies. We also developed a multi-agent system called OntoQ which is based on semantic approximation and coordination for illustrating our approach.

Keywords: semantic web; ontology; multi-agent systems; MAS; semantic coordination; semantic approximation; artificial intelligence; agent coordination; web agents; distributed ontologies; ontology interoperability; agent-based systems; multi-agent communication.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIIDS.2009.025161

International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, 2009 Vol.3 No.2, pp.163 - 179

Published online: 14 May 2009 *

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