Potential Applications of Ontology-Based Multi-Agent Systems

Overview

In this book, we introduced multi-agents systems in Chapter 2 and ontologies in Chapter 3. Many advantages of ontology-based, agent-based and the integrated ontology/agent-based systems are described in Chapter 6. We described a number of existing design methodologies for agent-based systems in Chapter 4 and ontology- based systems in Chapter 5. We have developed our own design methodology by examining the strengths and weaknesses of the existing design methodologies. This new design methodology consists of two parts: the ontology design part which is described in Chapter 7, and the multi-agent design part, described in Chapter 8. The notation for ontology-based multi-agent systems is defined in Chapter 9, while the system architecture and system implementation are described in Chapters 10 and 11. The implementation of ontology-based multi-agent system in the domain of human diseases and the software engineering domain is described in Chapters 12 and 13 respectively.

In this chapter, we will highlight the three main application areas (Collaborative Environments, Information Access and Retrieval; and Data Mining). We will also discuss some open issues related to the implementation of the ontologybased, multi-agent systems.