SEMANTIC-BASED REPOSITORY OF AGENT COMPONENTS
MERLIN PARRA JIMENEZ · 2012
We posit that a robust development environment for the construction of agent-oriented software systems must be enhanced by advanced reuse methods. However, research addressing agent reuse is meager and does not tackle the problem of organizing and storing agent-oriented artifacts according to the software engineers’ needs. Therefore, the agent retrieval process turns into an important challenge to be overcome in agent-oriented software engineering. In this context, this paper proposes a repository prototype based on semantic web technologies that support reuse for developing agent systems. The repository includes: (1) a meta-model for representing the agents, represented by means of an ontology, (2) a taxonomy to classify agents according their application domains, (3) a recommendation system that allows end-users to discover reusable interrelated agents, and (4) enhanced search and browsing methods for agents. Finally, we discuss an illustrative example that shows the proposed reuse method is an improvement in terms of the relevance of retrieved agentoriented artifacts. Software agent reuse; agent component; agent-oriented artifact; agent repository; semantic information retrieval; agentoriented software engineering