Evaluation of scalable multi-agent system architectures for searching the Semantic Web
Ian Blacoe, Valentina A. M. Tamma, Michael Wooldridge · International Journal of Metadata Semantics and Ontologies · 2010
The Semantic Web (SW) is an open environment where heterogeneous and distributed knowledge is rendered machine-processable using ontologies, their extensions, and annotation metadata. The volume of resources available for semantic annotation indicates a requirement for scalable and robust mechanisms to search for resources using the encoded knowledge. SERSE is a multi-agent system to index, query, retrieve and aggregate Semantic Web resources. SERSE agents apply ontological knowledge to maintain a distributed semantic index, that is inter-connected by a semantic overlay network. Efficient retrieval of resources is achieved by the semantic routing mechanism, that locates those agents indexing resources matching a query. The paper presents the routing mechanism and an analytical evaluation of some of the autonomic features exhibited by the agents in order to ensure scalability.