Introducing autonomic behaviour in semantic web agents

Abstract

This paper presents SERSE - SEmantic Routing SystEm- a distributed multi-agent system composed of specialised agents that provides robust and efficient gathering and aggregation of digital content from diverse resources. The agents composing SERSE use ontological descriptions to search and retrieve semantically annotated knowledge sources, by maintaining a semantic index of the instances of the annotation ontology. The efficient retrieval is made it possible through the semantic routing mechanism, that permits to identify the agent indexing the resources requested by a user query without having to maintain a central index, and by reducing the number of messages broadcasted to the system. The system is also capable of exhibiting autonomic behaviour. Autonomic behaviour is characterised by self configuration and self healing capabilities, aimed at permitting the system to manage the failure of one of its agents and ensure continuous functioning. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.