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A UML profile and mapping for the generation of ontology-specific content languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2002

STEPHEN CRANEFIELD  and
MARTIN PURVIS
STEPHEN CRANEFIELD
Affiliation:
Department of Information Science, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand; e-mail: scranefield@infoscience.otago.ac.nz, mpurvis@infoscience.otago.ac.nz
MARTIN PURVIS
Affiliation:
Department of Information Science, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand; e-mail: scranefield@infoscience.otago.ac.nz, mpurvis@infoscience.otago.ac.nz
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Abstract

This paper examines a perceived desire amongst software agent application and platform developers to have the ability to send domain-specific objects within inter-agent messages. If this feature is to be supported without departing from the notion that agents communicate in terms of knowledge, it is important that the meaning of such objects be well defined. Using an object-oriented metamodelling approach, the relationships between ontologies and agent communication and content languages in FIPA-style agent systems are examined. It is argued that for use with distributed multi-agent systems, ontologies should describe the nature of object identity and reference for each defined concept, and a UML profile supporting these modelling capabilities is presented. Finally it is shown how, given an ontology in UML, an ontology-specific object-oriented content language can be generated, allowing object structures (viewed in the abstract as UML object diagrams) to be used within message content to represent propositions, definite descriptions or (for classes without identity) value expressions.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Knowledge Engineering Review , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 21 - 39
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Thanks to the members of the FIPA agentcities mailing list for stimulating our thoughts on this topic, especially Federico Bergenti who espoused the need for a “metamodel” for content languages and thereby inspired the design of the abstract content language model shown in Figure 3.