Ontology-Related Services in Agent-Based Distributed Information Infrastructures

Ontologies are an emerging paradigm to support declarativity, interoperability, and intelligent services in many areas, such as Agent–based Computation, Distributed Information Systems, and Expert Systems. In the context of designing a scalable, agent-based middleware for the realization of distributed Organizational Memories (OM), we examine the question what ontology–related services must be provided as middleware components. To this end, we discuss three basic dimensions of information that have fundamental impact on the usefulness of ontologies for OMs, namely formality, stability, and sharing scope of information. A short discussion of techniques which are suited to find a balance in each of these dimensions leads to a characterization of roles of ontology–related actors in the OM scenario. We describe the several roles with respect to their goals, knowledge, competencies, rights, and obligations. These actor classes and the related competencies are candidates to define a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: SEKE
• Authors: Ludger van Elst, Andreas Abecker
• Keywords: Agent-based Middleware, Middleware Components, Ontologies, SEKE 2001, Software Engineering