Integrating Transportation Ontologies Using Semantic Web Languages

Communication between agents is possible only when agents understand ontologies used in exchanged messages. Since we cannot hope that one universally accepted ontology would be ever created, approaches allowing using different ontologies by different agents must be used. In this paper, we present a way of expressing mappings between ontologies and using these mappings for communication between agents. To illustrate our approach, we have chosen several ontologies that describe transportation domain and created partial mappings between them. The mappings are expressed as matching forward rules which can be applied to messages exchanged between agents. In this way, messages are translated between different ontologies, as we demonstrate on an implementation that uses Jade and Jena packages. Using this approach, agents from different departments within one company or from different companies can be integrated even when they use different ontologies.

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