A Methodology for Creating Ontology-Based Multi-Agent Systems with an Experiment in Financial Application Development

The creation of an ontology for a particular business domain has advantages for application development, interoperability, reusability, and integration. Agent systems with an underlying ontology can exploit these advantages by providing semantically-aware applications. However, there is a lack of support for ontology development in existing methodologies for designing and building multi-agent systems for business applications. We describe a methodology and an experiment for building such systems. The approach focuses on the development of ontology as the driving force of the development processes and strives to put application development in the hands of domain experts, requiring as little as possible from software developers. We describe two complementary aspects of the approach: (i) a phased, iterative methodology and (ii) a pipeline of select tools with which to carry out the methodology. We report results of an experiment in developing an application for finance, including an evaluation, lessons learned, and recommendations.