Distributed Knowledge Management Based on Software Agents and Ontology

In this paper we present the use of ontology for knowledge representation and handling in Software Agent Systems. Motivation has come from Pellucid IST project where we need to capture and capitalize employee’s knowledge in organization. This knowledge is then presented to other employees as they work on particular tasks. The Protégé ontology editor and JADE multi-agent system is used for implementation. Ontology is usually used in intra-agent communication for agents to understand each other; we used ontology also as knowledge data model to store knowledge as instances of ontological terms into object database, thus agents can access and manipulate knowledge data directly and still stay lightweight.