Introduction

Welcome to the Ontology working group homepage in Agentcities. Our objective is to consider the practical usage of ontologies and ontology frameworks in the context of the Agentcities network. Ontologies have established themselves as a powerful tool to enable knowledge sharing, and a growing number of applications have benefited from the use of ontologies as a means to achieve semantic interoperability among heterogeneous, distributed agent systems. This working group aims to provide both foundational and technological support to the use of ontologies in distributed agent platforms. In particular the ontology working group will look at the following issues:

• Transition from theory to practice: application of theoretical methodologies  to practical problems; 
• Reconciliation of semantic heterogeneity (translation issues and  representation structures) due to differences among cultures and modelling approahes;
• Use and extension of existing ontologies and standards; 
• Co-ordination to the .RTD: BT ontology server, BT business ontologies;
• Contribution to DAML+OIL and DAML-S repositories;        ·
• Input from external sources such as W3C, or  IEEE SUO. 

Our activities

We are working on producing methodological and technological recommendations to facilitate the use of ontologies in Agentcities. We will make use of comparative studies in order to identify the methodologies and technologies most suitable for the applications developed within Agentcities.
We also provide a list of more extensive resources for those interested in gaining a richer insight on ontology research.

ID4 in Helsinki

Support group

The following people are contributing to the working groups activities:

Further information