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.
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Guizzardi, R.S.S., Guizzardi, G., Perini, A., Mylopoulos, J. (2007). Towards an Ontological Account of Agent-Oriented Goals. In: Choren, R., Garcia, A., Giese, H., Leung, Hf., Lucena, C., Romanovsky, A. (eds) Software Engineering for Multi-Agent Systems V. SELMAS 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4408. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73131-3_9
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