Adding OWL Semantics to Ontologies Used in Multi-agent Systems for Manufacturing

Ontologies are needed for agent communication as they provide means for describing intended semantics of the language used for expressing the content of messages. We show what types of ontologies and their descriptions are used in the area of multi-agent systems for manufacturing and compare them with the ontology modeling languages in the semantic web area. We present a framework that enables adding semantics of OWL ontologies used in the semantic web to the ontologies without any formal explicit description used in the manufacturing domain (expressed usually in XML). The ontologies with explicitly defined semantics can be used for purposes that require formal semantics such as for automated reasoning over the source ontologies from the manufacturing domain or for integration of manufacturing and semantic web agents. This integration is one of the key issues for successful development of agent-based solutions for manufacturing as well as virtual enterprises.