Ontologies in Agent Architectures

Agents display a dual behavior: on the one hand they are goal directed programs that autonomously and proactively solve problems for their users; on the other hand agents have a social dimension when they interoperate as part of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). As autonomous problem solvers, agents need to develop a model of their environment that allows them to reason on how the actions that they perform affect their environment, and how those changes lead them to achieve their goals. Ontologies provide the conceptual framework that allows agents to construct such models: ontologies describe the type of entities that agents encounter, the properties of those entities, and the relations between them. For example, a stock reporting agent may require ontologies describing not only concepts like ticker symbol, but also the relation between stock and ticker symbol and properties of stocks such as its value expressed in some currency.