Towards a Pragmatic Use of Ontologies in Multi-agent Platforms

The knowledge representation field is gaining momentum with the advent of the Semantic Web activity within the W3C. This working group, thanks to previous researches, has proposed the Ontology Web Language to enhance the expressivity of web pages and to allow semantic inferences. This paper argues that knowledge representation technologies should be core components of multi-agent platforms. In the first part of this paper, we introduce our agent model that relies on the notion of skill. Then, we identify several criteria that let us to believe that the Owl language should be used as a content language within Agent Communication Languages and also in the design of multi-agent platforms. In the last part, we discuss the conceptual and technological challenges that platform designers coming from the multi-agent field have to deal with when trying to integrate knowledge representation technologies.