Agent Communication with Differentiated Ontologies: Eight New Measures of Description Compatibility

Abstract

We propose an approach to achieve appropriate exchange of services and data in distributed systems subject to semantic heterogeneity. We assume differentiated ontologies: that terms have formal definitions as concepts related to other concepts, that local concepts inherit from concepts that are shared, and that most or all primitives are shared. We then develop measures of description compatibility using the structure of the source and target definitions. We evaluate these measures by generating description-logic ontologies in artificial worlds. In our simulations, the meaning of a concept is its denotation in a finite universe of instances. The accuracy of the description- compatibility measures can thus be judged by their success in predicting the overlap of concept denotations. Description compatibility can be used to guide agent search for services across communities that subscribe to differentiated ontologies.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1999
Accession Number
ADA465320

Entities

People

  • Peter C. Weinstein
  • William P. Birmingham

Organizations

  • University of Michigan

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Bayesian Networks
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Science
  • Databases
  • Information Processing
  • Information Retrieval
  • Information Science
  • Knowledge Management
  • Language
  • Machine Learning
  • Models
  • Multiagent Systems
  • Neural Networks
  • Ontologies
  • Probability
  • Reliability

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software Engineering