Ontologies for Interaction Protocols

In this paper we propose reducing the degree of human interpretation currently necessary to understand an interaction protocol by describing at an abstract level the required agent actions that must be ‘plugged into’ the protocol for it to be executed. In particular, this can be done by designing and publishing ontologies describing the input and output data that are processed during the protocol’s execution together with the actions and decisions that the agents must perform. An agent (or agent developer) that has previously defined mappings between the internal agent code and the actions and decisions in an ontology would then be able to interpret any interaction protocol that is defined with reference to that ontology. The discussion is based on the use of Coloured Petri Nets to represent interaction protocols and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for ontology modelling. An alternative approach using Agent UML (AUML) is also outlined.

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