Bilateral semantic negotiation: a decentralised approach to ontology enrichment in open multi-agent systems

A key problem in multi-agent systems is represented by communication difficulties among agents having different ontologies. Since, in many cases, the presence of a unique, common ontology does not seem a suitable solution, some approaches have been proposed in the past to provide each user with his own personal ontology. These approaches face possible communication problems by means of a multilateral semantic negotiation. Although effective, this solution reduces its efficiency drastically when the agent community becomes large. This paper proposes a new solution, based on bilateral semantic negotiation, to support agent communication and the consequent ontology enrichment. This solution maintains the effectiveness of multilateral semantic negotiation and, at the same time, reduces the required costs.