An ontology-based architecture for multi-agent system environment

The increasing interest towards e-business systems, and thus the need of the companies to communicate with other companies in an efficient and flexible way, brings to a new way of thinking about information systems that open itself towards distributed systems where the exchange of information may happen. The problem is in the way that this exchange can be made both from the technology point of view and from the conceptual point of view. If from a side a recent technology for information exchange (DDS- Data Distribution Service) can help us from the other one it seem interesting the use of ontology as representation tool of application domain that must open itself to the communication. In this paper we present an architecture that is oriented to a multi-agent communication that uses ontologies and DDS as information exchange protocol. The architecture here presented must be repeat without difficulties on an e-business system assuming that each agent of the proposed architecture is a company in an e-business system.