A two-level approach for ontology management in multi-agent systems

The work presented in this paper is an attempt to bridge two co-existing realities: semantic Web and multi-agent systems. Agents should be enhanced with tools and mechanisms in order to autonomously achieve this strategic and ambitious objective. In this paper, we focus on what we consider the central issue when moving towards the vision of semantic multi-agent systems: the ontology 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 not to be feasible. In our opinion, a good compromise is represented by a two-level approach: a light ontology support embedded in each agent and one or more ontology servers providing a more expressive and powerful ontology support to the agents of the systems.