Ontology agents in FIPA-compliant platforms: A survey and a new proposal

In 2001, FIPA delivered a specification suggesting that each MAS should integrate an "Ontology Agent" (OA) offering services for ontology management. These services should include ontology discovery, maintenance, matching, as well as translation of expressions between different ontologies or content languages. Currently, no FIPA-compliant OA exists that implements all of them. One of the reasons is that providing a service for ontology matching is not an easy task, and coping with translation between ontologies and/or content languages may be even harder. In this paper we survey the state of the art in the area, and we describe our prototypical implementation of an OA for Jade able to match ontologies. Besides "standard" ontology matching algorithms, our OA offers a "matching via upper ontologies" method that, as we showed in a recent technical report, improves the precision of the matching w.r.t. the use of traditional techniques