A Dialogue Protocol to Support Meaning Negotiation

Despite numerous efforts, the problem of dynamically reconciling heterogeneity within open distributed multi-agent systems is far from solved. As different systems often use their own vocabularies to express the content of communication messages (ontologies), semantic reconciliation requires some form of agreement over a shared model, obtained through an alignment whereby concepts in the requester’s ontology are mapped (translated) into concepts in the respondent’s one. This paper presents a dialogue that allows agents to reach an agreement over a correspondence between two entities in their respective ontologies in a decentralised fashion, without requiring prior knowledge over their ontological models.