Method and apparatus for providing rule-based, autonomous software agent with ontological information

Autonomous systems require efficient run-time performance. In agents optimized for performance, control structures and domain knowledge are often intertwined, providing efficient execution but brittle knowledge bases that scale poorly. Combining ontology representations and agents optimized for performance can capitalize the strengths of individual approaches and reduce individual weaknesses. Automatic translators are to convert ontological representations, hand-coded procedures for ontological inference, and explanation-based learning to cache inference.