The Ontology for Agents, Systems and Integration of Services: OASIS version 2
Giampaolo Bella, Domenico Cantone, Carmelo Fabio Longo, Marianna Nicolosi-Asmundo, Daniele Francesco Santamaria
TL;DR
The paper addresses the need for a formal, semantically interoperable representation of agents and their commitments in multi-agent systems within the Semantic Web. It introduces OASIS 2, a foundational OWL 2 ontology that adopts a behaviouristic theory of agency, organizing agent capabilities around behaviours, goals, tasks, and plan executions, and extending this with templates, execution objects, and planning constructs. Key contributions include the unification of abstract templates, concrete behaviours, plans, and actions via TemplateThing, BehaviourThing, PlanningThing, and ExecutionThing, the formalization of plan executions and plan entrustments, and the integration of Ontological Smart Contracts and blockchain-oriented mechanics. The work advances the semantic modeling of agents for plug-and-play interoperability, supports semantic blockchain representations of contracts, and sets the stage for future enhancements in consensus, security constraints, and framework integration (e.g., JADE, CArtAgO).
Abstract
Semantic representation is a key enabler for several application domains, and the multi-agent systems realm makes no exception. Among the methods for semantically representing agents, one has been essentially achieved by taking a behaviouristic vision, through which one can describe how they operate and engage with their peers. The approach essentially aims at defining the operational capabilities of agents through the mental states related with the achievement of tasks. The OASIS ontology -- An Ontology for Agent, Systems, and Integration of Services, presented in 2019 -- pursues the behaviouristic approach to deliver a semantic representation system and a communication protocol for agents and their commitments. This paper reports on the main modeling choices concerning the representation of agents in OASIS 2, the latest major upgrade of OASIS, and the achievement reached by the ontology since it was first introduced, in particular in the context of ontologies for blockchains.