Deciding agent orientation on ontology mappings

Abstract

Effective communication in open environments relies on the ability of agents to reach a mutual understanding of the exchanged message by reconciling the vocabulary (ontology) used. Various approaches have considered how mutually acceptable mappings between corresponding concepts in the agents' own ontologies may be determined dynamically through argumentation-based negotiation (such as Meaning-based Argumentation, MbA). In this paper we present a novel approach to the dynamic determination of mutually acceptable mappings, that allows agents to express a private acceptability threshold over the types of mappings they prefer. We empirically compare this approach with the Meaning-based Argumentation and demonstrate that the proposed approach produces larger agreed alignments thus better enabling agent communication. Furthermore, we compare and evaluate the fitness for purpose of the generated alignments, and we empirically demonstrate that the proposed approach has comparable performance to the MbA approach. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.