During the last two decades, the idea of Semantic Web has received a
great deal of attention. An extensive body of knowledge has emerged to
describe technologies that seek to help us create and use aspects of the
Semantic Web. Ontology and agent-based technologies are understood to be
the two important technologies here. A large number of articles and a
number of books exist to describe the use individually of the two
technologies and the design of systems that use each of these
technologies individually, but little focus has been given on how one
can - sign systems that carryout integrated use of the two different
technologies. In this book we describe ontology and agent-based systems
individually, and highlight advantages of integration of the two
different and complementary te- nologies. We also present a methodology
that will guide us in the design of the - tegrated ontology-based
multi-agent systems and illustrate this methodology on two use cases
from the health and software engineering domain. This book is organized
as follows: - Chapter I, Current issues and the need for ontologies and
agents, describes existing problems associated with uncontrollable
information overload and explains how ontologies and agent-based systems
can help address these - sues. - Chapter II, Introduction to multi-agent
systems, defines agents and their main characteristics and features
including mobility, communications and collaboration between different
agents. It also presents different types of agents on the basis of
classifications done by different authors.
