A mechanism for discovering semantic relationships among agent communication protocols
Idoia Berges, Jesús Bermúdez, Alfredo Goñi, Arantza Illarramendi
TL;DR
The paper tackles semantic interoperability among heterogeneous agent communication protocols by coupling a dedicated communication acts ontology (CommOnt) with dynamic semantics based on the Event Calculus. It represents protocols in OWL-DL and via fluent semantics, deriving protocol traces through SWRL-encoded rules, and then pairs branches from different protocols to infer semantic relationships. The authors define a formal set of relationships (equivalence, specialization, restriction, prefix, suffix, infix, complement_to_infix) and provide an algorithm, along with properties and proofs, to compute them; a road-accident scenario demonstrates the method. The approach supports flexible interoperation and protocol composition across diverse information systems, with a Java implementation and Pellet reasoning, and points to future integration with Web Services contexts.
Abstract
One relevant aspect in the development of the Semantic Web framework is the achievement of a real inter-agents communication capability at the semantic level. Agents should be able to communicate with each other freely using different communication protocols, constituted by communication acts. For that scenario, we introduce in this paper an efficient mechanism presenting the following main features: - It promotes the description of the communication acts of protocols as classes that belong to a communication acts ontology, and associates to those acts a social commitment semantics formalized through predicates in the Event Calculus. - It is sustained on the idea that different protocols can be compared semantically by looking to the set of fluents associated to each branch of the protocols. Those sets are generated using Semantic Web technology rules. - It discovers the following types of protocol relationships: equivalence, specialization, restriction, prefix, suffix, infix and complement_to_infix.