MagentA Home

Ontology Concepts and Facilities

In agent-based applications, the term ontology refers to the description of an environment (business, physical, economic or any other) within which agents operate. Ontology contains objects upon which agents act and rules which they must follow.

For example, the ontology comprising corporate knowledge forms the basis of agent activities in the MagentA i-Enterprise System. It describes the structure of a company, roles of its employees, main directions of its business activities, goods produced and sold, current and potential clients of the company and many other important aspects of the business. This knowledge represents the intellectual capital of the corporation, which is constantly being modified, deleted, updated, verified and replaced, developing and evolving along with the corporation.

MagentA Systems, unlike traditional systems, use ontology in the form of a semantic network to describe subject domains and specific applications. This network uses fundamental concepts such as object, process, property, attribute and relation, to structure the relevant knowledge. The use of such a network allows us to separate knowledge of a domain from the source code governing agent runtime behaviour and to re-use it for a range of applications.

As a result, all functional differences between various MagentA systems and applications are defined by the domain knowledge stored in a collection of market-specific and application-specific ontology. The system's functionality is the same for any subject domain, whether it is concerned with matching the needs and capabilities of agents, or the organisation of their negotiation. Additionally, to increase efficiency, a range of ontological components can be implemented using libraries of extensions of the MagentA Engine that already contain this data hard-coded.

The co-ordinated activity, performed by multi-agent systems on the common ontology of an application, provides conditions for the creation of an Emergent Intelligence, based on the mechanisms of self-organisation and evolution. Unlike traditional systems, which are usually statically integrated, all MagentA systems and their agents interact dynamically, negotiating the conditions of this interaction.

Ontology Development Toolkit

To automate the process of developing ontology for subject domains, MagentA has developed the Ontology Development Toolkit. The use of the toolkit considerably simplifies the process of developing new systems and updating existing applications.

Simple and convenient development of ontology is a distinguishing feature of MagentA software engines, systems and applications. It is possible not only for specialist programmers, but for users such as managers and application specialists to update and modify the ontology of existing or new applications, developing and adapting these systems to their needs without re-programming. The MagentA Knowledge Management System allows automatic generation of new knowledge and updating of a corporate ontology on the basis of analysis of current enterprise activity.

Domain-Specific and Application-Specific ontology

Using the MagentA system and facilities for ontology construction, special-purpose multi-agent applications can be custom-built at any time. These systems can contain fully or partially defined updateable ontology. Since MagentA Engine is generic, that is, applicable in many domains, building of a specific application is best done in steps, starting from a basic ontology already built into any MagentA product. First, a vertical-market specific ontology (Domain Ontology) is constructed and then a customer specific ontology (Application Ontology) is built on top.

Back to Technologies

MagentA Home