ASBO: Argumentation System Based on Ontologies

Conflicts are unavoidable in open distributed systems. Belief or semantic conflicts are of special interest in multiagent systems, where agents need to communicate by exchanging knowledge. A common approach to deal with conflicts is the use of argumentation-based negotiation processes. There have been much work in the argumentation research arena. Amongst the outcomes of this research, some generic argumentation frameworks for handling inconsistences can be found, together with several persuasion dialogue systems. The goal of this paper is to contribute in advancing the state-of-art in argumentation by extending the basic mechanisms used in conventional argumentation frameworks. This contribution consists of a new and convenient style of attack to arguments and making explicit the argumentation process structure through an OWL-based ontology. Main benefits of this research are twofold. Firstly, the availability of a more realistic framework thanks to the definition of the new attack. Secondly, to enable automatic reasoning about the argumentation process itself. To illustrate this approach, we expose a persuasive argumentation scenario based on a real situation.