Efficient argumentation over ontology correspondences

• Authors: Paul Doran;Valentina Tamma;Ignazio Palmisano;Terry R. Payne
• Venue: Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2
• Year: 2009

The ability to communicate is one of the key capabilities of an agent within a Multi-Agent System. In open environments, where agents are likely to use heterogeneous ontologies, it is necessary to use formally defined ontologies [1] to support communication. However, this requires either a shared ontology, or a set of correspondences (alignment) that map semantically related entities from one ontology to another. The open nature of such environments results in this being unlikely due to few a priori assumptions being made about the agents present; thus requiring techniques for dynamic alignment and reconciliation. To dynamically reconcile heterogeneous ontologies, agents need to be able to agree on an acceptable alignment between their ontologies. Various approaches attempt to resolve ontological mismatches in open environments [8, 4], using negotiation approaches that search the space of alignments to find a mutually acceptable set of correspondences. However, this search can become prohibitively costly when negotiation mechanisms such as argumentation are involved, reaching II(p)2-complete [5]. Hence, it is important to reduce the search space before the argumentation process takes place. The Meaning-based Argumentation approach [8] allows two agents to dynamically and automatically reach consensus by arguing over a set of candidate mappings (or correspondences) obtained from a mapping repository. We have explored the use of Ontology Modularization as a filtering mechanism for reducing the number of candidate mappings, by isolating only those mappings that are relevant to the communication, and hence reducing the size of the search space for the argumentation process.