Extrospection: Agents reasoning about the environment

Abstract

Current practices for agent-infrastructure interaction enforce agent designers to hard code the name and the use of the infrastructure components in the agent. Therefore, agents can only function within an environment which is a priori known to the agent designer. Even in these environments, agents are not robust against the modification or failure of the infrastructures that may occur at run time. This makes agents fragile in the context of distributed, large scale, and complex environments. We argue that semantic technologies can be employed to overcome these limitations. This paper introduces an ontology called OWL-T that supports the specifications of infrastructure components that allow..