Publications Details
Ontological leveling and elicitation for complex industrial transactions
The authors present an agent-oriented mechanism that uses a central ontology as a means to conduct complex distributed transactions. This is done by instantiating a template object motivated solely by the ontology, then automatically and explicitly linking each temple element to an independently constructed interface component. Validation information is attached directly to the links so that the agent need not know a priori the semantics of data validity, merely how to execute a general validation process to satisfy the conditions given in the link. Ontological leveling is critical: all terms presented to informants must be semantically coherent within the central ontology. To illustrate this approach in an industrial setting, they discuss an existing implementation that conducted international commercial transactions on the World-Wide Web. Agents operating within a federated architecture construct, populate by Web-based elicitation, and manipulate a distributed composite transaction object to effect transport of goods over the US/Mexico border.