Argumentation over ontology correspondences in MAS

Abstract

In order to support semantic interoperation in open environments, where agents can dynamically join or leave and no prior assumption can be made on the ontologies to align, the different agents involved need to agree on the semantics of the terms used during the interoperation. Reaching this agreement can only come through some sort of negotiation process. Indeed, agents will differ in the domain ontologies they commit to; and their perception of the world, and hence the choice of vocabulary used to represent concepts. We propose an approach for supporting the creation and exchange of different arguments, that support or reject possible correspondences. Each agent can decide, according to its preferences, whether to accept or refuse a candidate correspondence. The proposed framework considers arguments and propositions that are specific to the matching task and are based on the ontology semantics. This argumentation framework relies on a formal argument manipulation schema and on an encoding of the agents' preferences between particular kinds of arguments.

Ten Challenges for Ontology Matching

“…This has already been considered in the field of multi-agent systems where raw alignments are refined by agent negotiation [17,47]. Therefore, explanations of matching (see §11), being an argumentation schema, become crucial.…”

“…In fact, alignments produced by matching systems may not be intuitively obvious to human users, and therefore, they need to be explained. Having understood the alignments returned by a matching system, users can deliberately edit them manually, thereby providing the feedback to the system, see [11,47,75] for the solutions proposed so far and [25] for their in-depth analysis.…”

A Deduction System for Meaning Negotiation

“…Only a few works, however, have considered MN as a process; for instance, [11,5] deal with MN as an ontology alignment process, and [13,8,1,14,2] deal with negotiation issues from the point of view of game theory. In particular, a MN between two agents is similar to a Bargaining Game [10], i.e., the game in which two agents have to share, say, one dollar and do this by each making a proposal.…”

Deciding Agent Orientation on Ontology Mappings

“…The problem of dynamic reconciliation of ontologies (vocabularies) used by agents during interactions has received significant attention [8,10,12], due to the growing adoption of mobile and service computing. In these scenarios, agents situated in open environments encounter unknown agents offering new services as a user's context or location changes.…”

“…al. [8] proposed in their Meaning-based Argumentation (MbA) approach the use of argumentation to select a set of mappings (i.e. an alignment) that is mutually acceptable to the negotiating agents, from the union of disparate, precomputed alignments where different alignments may have previously been generated (e.g.…”