Ontology Reasoning in Agent-Oriented Programming

DL-Lite is being regarded as an effective logic for ontology reasoning due both to its expressive power and its computational properties. Considering that ontologies are important constructs for multi-agent system, in this paper we propose the integration of ontology reasoning and agent-oriented programming. More specifically, we consider an agent-oriented programming language based on DL-Lite with belief bases consisting of an immutable TBox, with the characterization of concepts and roles, and of an ABox with factual knowledge, which can change as the result of perception of the environment, internal actions, and inter-agent communication. We discuss the benefits of ontological reasoning and we give algorithms for belief base querying, plan selection, and for a principled approach for belief base update. The language we propose, AgentSpeak-DL, is a subset of AgentSpeak, a well known BDI multi-agent oriented programming language.