An ontology support for semantic aware agents

The work presented in this paper is an attempt to bridge two co-existing realties: Semantic Web and Multi-Agent Systems. Semantic aware agents will be able to interoperate in a semantic way as well as to produce and consume semantically annotated information and services. Agents should be enhanced with tools and mechanisms in order to autonomously achieve these strategic and ambitious objectives. In this paper, we focus on what we consider the central issue when moving towards the vision of semantic multi-agent systems: the ontology management support. Due to the heterogeneity of resources available and roles played by different agents of a system, a one-level approach with the aim of being omni comprehensive seems to be seldom feasible. In our opinion, a good compromise is represented by a two-level approach: a light ontology management support embedded in each agent and one or more ontology servers, providing a more expressive and powerful support.