Agents on the Web: Ontologies for Agents
Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh · 1997
When we need to find the cheapest airfare, we call our travel agent, Betsi, at Prestige Travel. We are able to communicate with Betsi because we all speak the same language, English, and we all understand the basic elements of the subject matter under discussion, such as tickets, planes, destinations, departure times, and fares. But, suppose it is after hours and we are all busy, so we would instead like our software agent to contact Betsi’s software agent and arrange our flights. None of our agents understands English, so how can they communicate? Ontologies may be the answer. “What are ontologies?” An ontology is a computational model of some portion of the world. It is often captured in some form of a semantic network—a graph whose nodes are concepts or individual objects and whose arcs represent relationships or associations among the concepts. Properties and attributes, constraints, functions, and rules that govern the behavior of the concepts augment the semantic network.