In a multi-agent system the agents communicate between them in order to fullfil the global goal or their local goals. When the system is an open one, i.e. the agents enter and leave the system dynamically, the problem of ontology heterogeneity becomes more important and has to be solved. In order to communicate, agents need to share the same ontology (totally or partially) or at least common concepts that are synonyms. Thus, an ontology mapping mechanism has to be included in the system. The paper presents some ontology mapping methods that were reported in the literature, and focus on the application of OntoMap, an ontology mapping mechanism that we have proposed in a previous work, in the case of an open multi-agent system such as VIRT_CONSTRUCT, an agent-based virtual enterprise that we have developed in the housing domain.
ontology mapping, multi-agent system, lexical method, structural method.
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