Knowledge Based Agents

 

Knowledge Based Agents research is all about understanding how systems, services, and devices can work intelligently with each other within an dynamic or transient environment.  Drawing from several research areas, we are exploring how intelligent systems can discover and interact with each other, and overcome semantic interoperability resulting from the differences in the way they model the surrounding environment and their knowledge ontologically.  This work includes understanding how alignments between ontologies can be created or selected consensually, whilst minimising the unnecessary disclosure of the ontological model, as well as ensuring only those concepts relevant to a task or goal are aligned, and thus reducing workload.  The research includes work on coalitions, argumentation, ontological modeling, cognitive modeling, description logics, game theory and multi-agent systems, and has applicability to the use of services in mobile, dynamic or transient environments, such as Internet-of-Things and Ubiquitous Computing environments.


In the sections below, we provide a brief overview of the approaches taken, and list a selection of relevant publications for each.  For more information, contact Dr Terry Payne or Dr Valentina Tamma.  Or, for a high level view of semantics, services and agents, take a look at these two short articles:


  1. •Payne, T. R. (2008) Web Services from an Agent Perspective. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 23 (8).

  2. •Tamma, V. and Payne, T. R. (2008) Is a Semantic Web Agent a Knowledge-Savvy Agent? IEEE Intelligent Systems, 23 (4).

Agent-Mediated Agreement for Ontological Alignment

When interoperation between two heterogeneous knowledge-based systems is required, an integration phase is necessary whereby different knowledge models are reconciled (i.e. the entities within their individual ontological models are mapped) and possible implicit assumptions are clarified, especially for more dynamic and opportunistic scenarios, for example in e-commerce, open-data or mobile systems.


Traditional alignment systems rely on the ontologies to be aligned to be fully shared with one of the agents, or with a third-party responsible for generating alignments.  However, no single approach is necessarily suitable for all scenarios; and (partial) privacy has become increasingly pertinent, whereby neither agent or knowledge system is prepared to disclose its full ontology, for example, where the knowledge encoded within an ontology is confidential or commercially sensitive.  In our work, we have been investigating how different systems can cooperate in identifying and alignment through negotiation.

Zhi, N, Payne, T.R., Krysta. P. and Li, M. (2019) Truthful Mechanisms for Multi Agent Self-Interested Correspondence Selection. In The Proceedings of The 18th International Semnatic Web Conference, pp 733-750.

Krysta. P., Li, M., Payne, T.R. and Zhi, N. (2017) Mechanism Design for Ontology Alignment. In The Proceedings of The 16th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (extended abstract), 2017. (AAMAS17-Poster.pdf)

Jiménez-Ruiz, E., Payne T.R., Solimando, A. and Tamma, V. (2016) Limiting Consistency and Conservativity Violations through Negotiation. In: 15th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 16), pp 217-226.

Santos G., Tamma, V., Payne T.R., and Grasso, F. (2016) A Dialogue Protocol to Support Meaning Negotiation. In: The 15th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS2016) pp 1367-1368.

Geleta, D., Payne, T.R. and Tamma, T. (2016) An Investigation of Definability in Ontology Alignment.  In: The 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW2016), to appear.

Santos G., Tamma, V., Payne T.R., and Grasso, F. (2016) Discovering Ontological Correspondences through Dialogue.  In: The 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW2016), to appear.

Jiménez-Ruiz, E., Payne T.R., Solimando, A. and Tamma, V. (2015) Avoiding Alignment-based Conservativity Violations through Dialogue. In: The 12th OWL: Experiences and Directions Workshop (OWLED).

Payne T.R., and Tamma, V. (2015) Using Preferences in Negotiations over Ontological Correspondences. In: The 18th Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA 2015), pp 319-334.

Santos G., Tamma, V., Payne T.R., and Grasso, F. (2015) Dialogue Based Meaning Negotiation. In: The 15th Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA 2015), in press.

Payne T.R., and Tamma, V. (2014) A Dialectical Approach to Selectively Reusing Ontological Correspondences. In: The Nineteenth International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW2014), pp 397-412.

Payne T.R., and Tamma, V. (2014) Negotiating over Ontological Correspondences with Asymmetric and Incomplete Knowledge. In: The Thirteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems. (AAMAS’14), pp517-524.

Trojahn, C., Euzenat, E., Tamma, V., and Payne, T.R. (2011) Argumentation for reconciling agent ontologies. In  Atilla Elçi, Mamadou Tadiou Kone and Mehmet A. Orgun (eds). Semantic Agent Systems: Foundations and Applications, Book Chapter, pp 89-111.

Doran, P., Payne, T. R., Tamma, V. and Palmisano, I. (2010) Deciding Agent Orientation on Ontology Mappings. In: The 9th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2010), November 7-11th, Shanghai, China, pp161-176.

Palmisano, I., Doran, P., Tamma, V. and Payne, T. (2010) Flexible agreement mechanism for dynamic meaning negotiation. In: The 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. pp1599-1600.

Doran, P., Tamma, V., Payne, T. R. and Palmisano, I. (2009) Dynamic selection of ontological alignments: a space reduction mechanism. In: Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09), July 11th-17th, 2009, Pasadena, California, USA, pp 2028-2033.

Doran, P., Tamma, V., Payne, T. R. and Palmisano, I. (2009) Using Ontology Modularization for Efficient Negotiation over Ontology Correspondences in MAS.ArgMAS 2009: 236-255

Doran, P., Tamma, V., Palmisano, I. and Payne, T. R. (2009) Applying Ontology Modularization to Argumentation over Ontology Correspondences in MAS. In: The Eighth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. (AAMAS’09).

Laera, L., Blacoe, I., Tamma, V., Payne, T. R., Euzenat, J. and Bench-Capon, T. (2007) Argumentation over Ontology Correspondences in MAS. In: Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-07), 14-18th May, 2007, Hawai'i, USA.

Laera, L., Tamma, V., Euzenat, J., Bench-Capon, T. and Payne, T. R. (2006) Reaching agreement over ontology alignments. In: 5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006), November 5-9 2006, Athens, GA.

Laera, L., Tamma, V., Euzenat, J., Bench-Capon, T. and Payne, T. R. (2006) Agents Arguing Over Ontology Alignments. In: Fourth European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems, 14-15th December, Lisbon, Portugal. (In Press)

Laera, L., Tamma, V., Euzenat, J., Bench-Capon, T. and Payne, T. R. (2006) Arguing over ontology alignments. In: International Workshop on Ontology Matching (OM-2006), November 5 2006, Athens, GA.

Doran, V. Tamma, T.R. Payne and I. Palmisano: An entropy measure for evaluating ontology modularization. 5th International Conference on Knowledge Capture (KCap-09), September 1st-4th, 2009, Redondo Beach, California, USA. (In Press)

P. Doran, I. Palmisano, and V. Tamma: SOMET: Algorithm and Tool for SPARQL Based Ontology Module Extraction. Proceedings of the 2008 ESWC International Workshop on Ontologies: Reasoning and Modularity (WORM-08), Tenerife, Spain, 2008

P. Doran, V. Tamma, L. Iannone: Ontology Module Extraction for Ontology Reuse: An Ontology Engineering Perspective. Proceedings of the 2007 ACM CIKM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Lisbon, Portugal, 2007.

P. Doran, V. Tamma, L. Iannone: Ontology Module Extraction for Ontology Reuse: An Ontology Engineering Perspective. Proceedings of the 2007 ACM CIKM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Lisbon, Portugal, 2007.

Graph-based Ontology Modularisation

Ontologies have the power to grow significantly as they are augmented, or as new elements are added due to the inclusion of several different ontological models.  A variety of different approaches have been explored to identify self-contained ontology fragments given some signature (i.e. a subset of entities).  In our work, we have investigated graph-based approaches to ontology modularisation, and in ISWC 2009 published a comparative evaluation of a number of different approaches over a variety of datasets:


  1. •Palmisano, I., Tamma, V., Payne, T. and Doran, P. (2009) Task Oriented Evaluation of Module Extraction Techniques. In: The Eighth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC'09), pp 130-145 (bibtex)


Semantic Web Services

As one of the original members of the OWL for Services (OWL-S) coalition, we have been heavily involved in working on the concept of annotating service specifications using ontologies.   Originally published as DAML-S, this work has been seminal within the field of Semantic Web Services, and in particular in the discovery of services using tools such as UDDI, resulting in the following work:


  1. •Paolucci, M., Kawamura, T., Payne, T. R. and Sycara, K. (2002) Semantic Matching of Web Services Capabilities. In: International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 9 - 12 June, Sardinia, Italy. (bibtex)

  2. •Martin, D., Burstein, M., Hobbs, J., Lassila, O., McDermott, D., McIlraith, S., Narayanan, S., Paolucci, M., Parsia, B., Payne, T. R., Sirin, E., Srinivasan, N. and Sycara, K. (2004) OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services. Technical Report UNSPECIFIED, Member Submission, W3C.

  3. •Ankolekar, A., Burstein, M., Hobbs, J. R., Lassila, O., Martin, D. L., McDermott, D., McIlraith, S. A., Narayanan, S., Paolucci, M., Payne, T. R. and Sycara, K. (2002) DAML-S: Web Service Description for the Semantic Web. In: International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), June 9th - 12th, Sardinia, Italy. (bibtex)

  4. •Paolucci, M., Kawamura, T., Payne, T. R. and Sycara, K. (2002) Importing the Semantic Web in UDDI. In: Web Services, E-Business and Semantic Web Workshop, CAiSE 2002., May 2002, Toronto, Canada. (bibtex)


We have also explored how such approaches compare to other frameworks such as WSDL, and have defined the models formally using abstract modeling tools, and have investigated how legacy systems can be transitioned into semantically annotated web services.  A full list of relevant publications is given below.

Wang, H.H., Gibbins, N, Payne T.R., Patelli, A., and Wang, T. (2015) A survey of Semantic Web Services formalisms. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 27(15): 4053-4072 (2015)

Wang, H.H., Gibbins, N., Payne, T.R. and Patelli, A. (2013) A Survey of Semantic Web Services Formalisms. In the Ninth International Conference on Semantics, Knowledge and Grids (SKG), 2013, pp135-142

Wang, H.H., Gibbins, N., Payne, T.R. and Redavid, D. (2012) A Formal Model of the Semantic Web Service Ontology (WSMO). Information Systems Journal. 37 (1).

Wang, H.H., Damljanovic, D., Payne, T.R., Gibbins, N., and Bontcheva, K. (2012) Transition of Legacy Systems to Semantic Enabled Application: TAO Methodology and Tools. Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability Journal, 3(2), 2012.

Wang, H. h., Gibbins, N., Payne, T., Saleh, A. and Sun, J. (2008) A Formal Model of Semantic Web Service Ontology (WSMO) Execution. In: The Thirteenth IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS 2008), pp. 111-120, 31 Mar 2008 -- 4 Apr 2008, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Redavid, D., Ianone, L., Payne, T. and Semeraro, G. (2008) OWL-S Atomic services composition with SWRL rules. In: 17th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems (ISMIS'08), May 20-23, 2008, York University, Toronto, Canada. pp 605-611

Wang, H. H., Gibbins, N., Payne, T., Saleh, A. and Li, Y. (2008) Transitioning Applications to Semantic Web Services: An Automated Formal Approach. International Journal of Interoperability in Business Information Systems (IBIS) . ISSN 1862-6378

Wang, H. H., Gibbins, N., Payne, T., Saleh, A. and Sun, J. (2007) A Formal Semantic Model of the Semantic Web Service Ontology (WSMO). In: Twelfth IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems, July 11 - 14, 2007, Auckland, New Zealand.

Wang, H. W., Saleh, A., Payne, T. R. and Gibbins, N. (2007) Formal Specification of OWL-S with Object-Z. In: The First ESWC Workshop on OWL-S: Experiences and Future Directions, June, Innsbruck, Austria. (In Press)

Wang, H. H., Payne, T., Gibbins, N. and Saleh, A. (2007) Formal Specification of OWL-S with Object-Z: the Dynamic Aspect. In: The 8th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, pp. 237-248, Dec, Nancy, France. (In Press)

Wang, H. H., Saleh, A., Payne, T. and Gibbins, N. (2007) Formal Specification of OWL-S with Object-Z: the Static Aspect. In: The 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, Nov, Silicon Valley, USA. (In Press)

Wang, H. H., Dong, J. S., Sun, J., Payne, T. R., Gibbins, N., Li, Y. F. and Pan, J. (2007) An Integrated Formal Approach to Semantic Work Environments Design. In: Emerging Technologies for Semantic Work Environments: Techniques, Methods, pp. 262-280, IDEA GROUP. ISBN 978-1-59904-877-2

Redavid, D., Iannone, L. and Payne, T. (2007) OWL-S Atomic services composition with SWRL rules. In: Proceedings of the 4th Italian Semantic Web Workshop, 18-20 December, 2007, Dipartimento di Informatica - Universita' degli Studi di Bari - Italy.

Cabral, L., Domingue, J., Motta, E., Payne, T. R. and Hakimpour, F. (2004) Approaches to Semantic Web Services: An Overview and Comparison. In: European Semantic Web Conference. pp 225-239.

Martin, D., Paolucci, M., McIlraith, S., Burnstein, M., McDermott, D., McGuinness, D., Parsia, B., Payne, T. R., Sabou, M., Solanki, M., Srinivasan, N. and Sycara, K. (2004) Bringing Semantics to Web Services: The OWL-S Approach. In: First International Workshop on Semantic Web Services and Web Process Composition (SWSWPC 2004), San Diego, CA.

Martin, D., Burstein, M., Hobbs, J., Lassila, O., McDermott, D., McIlraith, S., Narayanan, S., Paolucci, M., Parsia, B., Payne, T. R., Sirin, E., Srinivasan, N. and Sycara, K. (2004) OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services. Member Submission, W3C.

Surridge, M., Marvin, D., Ashri, R., Payne, T. and Denker, G. (2004) Semantic Web Service Interaction Protocols: An Ontological Approach. In: Third International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2004), 9-11 November 2004, Hiroshima, Japan.

Payne, T. R. and Lassila, O. (2004) Semantic Web Services. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 19 (1). pp. 14-15.

Blake, M. B., Parsons, S. and Payne, T. R. (2004) The Synergy of Electronic Commerce, Agents, and Semantic Web Services. Knowledge Engineering Review, 19 (2). pp. 175-180.

Belecheanu, R. A., Jacyno, M. and Payne, T. (2004) Using OWL-S to annotate services with ancillary behaviour. In: First AKT Workshp on Semantic Web, December 8th, 2004, KMI, The Open Univeristy, Milton Keynes.

Moreau, L., Miles, S., Papay, J., Decker, K. and Payne, T. R. (2003) Publishing Semantic Descriptions of Services. In: GGF9 Semantic Grid Workshop.

Ankolekar, A., Burstein, M., Hobbs, J. R., Lassila, O., Martin, D. L., McDermott, D., McIlraith, S. A., Narayanan, S., Paolucci, M., Payne, T. R. and Sycara, K. (2002) DAML-S: Web Service Description for the Semantic Web. In: International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), June 9th - 12th, Sardinia, Italy.

Paolucci, M., Kawamura, T., Payne, T. R. and Sycara, K. (2002) Importing the Semantic Web in UDDI. In: Web Services, E-Business and Semantic Web Workshop, CAiSE 2002., May 2002, Toronto, Canada.

Payne, T. R., Singh, R. and Sycara, K. (2002) RCal: A Case Study on Semantic Web Agents. In: The First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, July 15th - July 19th, Bologna, Italy.

Paolucci, M., Kawamura, T., Payne, T. R. and Sycara, K. (2002) Semantic Matching of Web Services Capabilities. In: International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 9 - 12 June, Sardinia, Italy.

Ankolenkar, A., Burstein, M., Hobbs, J., Lassila, O., Martin, D., McIlraith, S., Narayanan, S., Paolucci, M., Payne, T. R., Sycara, K. and Zeng, H. (2001) DAML-S: A Semantic Markup Language For Web Services. In: Semantic Web Working Symposium (SWWS).