Use of semantic technology to describe and reason about communication protocols

Abstract

Nowadays there is a tendency to enhance the functionality of Information Systems by appropriate information agents. Those information agents communicate through communication acts expressed in an Agent Communication Language. Moreover, the aim is to achieve interoperation of those agents through standard communication protocols in a distributed environment such as that supported by the Semantic Web. In this paper we present a proposal to describe those protocols using a Semantic Web language. Two are the main features of that proposal. On the one hand, the communication acts that appear in the communication protocols are described by terms belonging to a communication acts ontology called COMMONT. On the other hand, protocols are represented by state transition systems described using OWL-DL language. This type of description provides the means to reason about the communication protocols in such a way that several kinds of structural relationships can be detected, namely if a protocol is a prefix, a suffix or an infix of another protocol and that relationship taken in a sense of equivalence or specialization. Furthermore, equivalence and specialization relationships can also be detected for complete protocols. Those relationships are captured by subsumption of classes described with a Semantic Web language