Visualization of ontologies in multi-agent industrial systems

The development in the field of multi-agent systems used in the industrial distributed control systems has demonstrated the possibility of flexibility, fault tolerance and integration. It was shown that using ontologies for explicit description of the world has many advantages, including easier integration and extensibility. However, any more complex system, including multi-agent system, needs visualization for its easier development, debugging and monitoring. The fact that the knowledge in the system is expressed in a standardized semantic way contributes to the possibility of providing a uniform view on the system as a whole as well as on the individual agents. In this paper we describe and discuss possibilities of visualization of the state of the industrial control system based on ontologies. We demonstrate the visualization possibilities on the MAST system.