Agent description and discovery (ADD) is a critical infrastructure for open multi-agent services. As multi-agent systems grow larger and more diverse, it becomes harder to locate useful service partner agents without efficient, effective ADD infrastructure. ADD functions rest on ontological foundations. Agent services are described and sought using terms that represent their identity, function, offerings, resource requirements, access rights, etc. In a truly distributed system, common global semantics for these terms can’t be assumed, and there may be competition for using the same terms to describe different agent services; term choice matters. Descriptions clearly influence searchability, while search processes clearly favor some description regimes over others. In general, then, we need principles for describing agents and for structuring search processes based on clear principles of how description and discovery interact. This research aims at developing those principles. We s...