ANEMONE: an effective minimal ontology negotiation environment

Communication in open heterogeneous multi agent systems is hampered by lack of shared ontologies. To overcome these problems, we propose a layered communication protocol which incorporates techniques for ontology exchange. Using this protocol, the agents gradually build towards a semantically integrated system by establishing minimal and effective shared ontologies. We tested our approach, called ANEMONE, on a number of heterogeneous news agents. We show how these agents successfully exchange information on news articles, despite initial difficulties raised by heterogeneous ontologies.