Integrating Semantic Web Technologies and Multi-Agent Systems: A Semantic Description of Multi-Agent Organizations

Introduction. Decentralization and openness are inherent properties of multiagent systems (MAS). The technologies they provide are thus the right abstraction for developing Web-oriented applications. Moreover, different works have been proposed to use Semantic Web technologies (SWT) for representing various dimensions of MAS (e.g., interaction protocols, norms, organizations). Given these facts, we think it is time to go a step further by integrating SWT and MAS in order to improve reusability of data, knowledge, coordination strategies, etc. on the Web and across systems. In this paper, we take a first step in this direction by proposing a semantic description of multi-agent organizations, showing the benefit regarding integration with Web ontologies.