Towards an Ontological Account of Agent-Oriented Goals

  • Renata S. S. Guizzardi
  • Giancarlo Guizzardi
  • Anna Perini
  • John Mylopoulos
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 4408)

Abstract

The software agent paradigm has received considerable attention recently, both in research and industrial practice. However, adoption of this software paradigm remains elusive in software engineering practice. We claim that part of the adoption problem lies with the fact that mentalistic and social concepts underlying agents are subjective and complex for the average practitioner. Specifically, although there are many efforts related to the topic coming from philosophy, cognitive sciences and computer science, a uniform and well-founded semantic view on these concepts is currently lacking. This work extends an existing upper-level ontology and offers it as a foundation for evaluating and designing agent-oriented modeling languages. In particular, the paper focuses on the concept of goal, aiming at disambiguating its definition, discussing its different manifestations, and clarifying its relation to other important agent-related concepts. For that, we examine how goals are conceived and used according to some relevant literature on agent-orientation. In addition, related work on akin fields, especially philosophy and AI are used as a basis for the proposed ontological extensions.

Keywords

Modeling Language Multiagent System Physical Agent Requirement Engineer Plan Execution 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007

Authors and Affiliations

  • Renata S. S. Guizzardi
    • 1
  • Giancarlo Guizzardi
    • 2
    • 3
  • Anna Perini
    • 1
  • John Mylopoulos
    • 4
  1. 1.ITC-irst, Trento-PovoItaly
  2. 2.Department of Computer Science, UFES, Vitória-ESBrazil
  3. 3.Laboratory of Applied Ontologies (ISTC-CNR), TrentoItaly
  4. 4.Department of Computer Science, University of TorontoCanada

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