Facilitating Interaction Between Virtual Agents Through Negotiation Over Ontological Representation

Abstract

Fluent, effortless, and diverse e-business transactions depend on the ability of automated agents to interact. The difficulties of tailoring representation and information to be consistent and therefore interoperable needs to fall not on human users but on these automated agents. In this chapter, the authors present their system, ORS (ontology repair system), which is designed to be a tool for automated agents, acting on behalf of people or systems which need to interact, to enable them to understand one another, despite the fact that they are not centrally or consistently designed.