Applying ontologies to the development and execution of Multi-Agent Systems.

Several advantages can be obtained by allowing multi-agent systems to easily access ontologies, for example, in scenarios where agents make their decisions based on knowledge provided by ontologies. Thus, this paper presents an infrastructure to allow the use of web ontologies in different agent-oriented platforms. The agents use this infrastructure layer as a tool for storing, accessing and querying domain-specific OWL ontologies. As a result, this layer allows an integration of agent platforms with semantic web data and ontologies. We exemplify in practice how agents, coded in one such platform, can use the proposed access layer to ontological reasoning engines, as well as which features can be obtained from it. We evaluated and compared performance and memory consumption of this semantic infrastructure against usual knowledge representation in agent programming.