Ontology Management for Agent Development

The content of agent messages is often defined according to some ontology through which agents can communicate with each other based on a common vocabulary. However, when ontology evolves, the existing agents may not be able to communicate properly with new agents built on the evolved ontology unless existing agents are re-designed or re-implemented. In this paper, we propose an ontology management platform called OntoWrap with three distinct components. Firstly it maintains an ontology repository which keeps track of changes to ontology so that the relationship between different versions of ontology and their extensions are maintained. Secondly, it maintains a service repository which links ontology with agent service specifications so that different implantations of an ontology are also maintained. Thirdly, based on the ontology versioning and service specifications, a wrapping service framework is provided for the automatic generation of adapter agents for existing agents to make use of new services.