Ontology Maintenance via Multi-agents

Ontology once confined to the world of philosophy has recently been moved to the regime of computer science. Major challenges and issues being faced by researchers in utilizing these growing ontologies is the proper maintenance of ontologies. Ontology maintenance is a broader term that encompasses in it a large number of complex activities like: combining,merging, integrating, aligning, mapping, articulation,translating, transforming, version and versioning.Ontology maintenance is usually handled manually or in some cases in semi-automatic ways. On the other hand multi-agent systems (MAS) are growing in popularity in solving the task of distributed, multi-disciplined,learning and coordination. We classify ontology maintenance as a task that can be a good candidate of MAS. In this paper we investigate a Multi-Agent Based approach that can be used to support fully automatic ontology maintenance. We also outline the major issues and challenges that can arise in a MAS environment that is being applied for ontology maintenance. We believe that this approach is first such attempt and demonstrate a proper amalgamation of the two disciplines that can support each other.