SOARI: A Service Oriented Architecture to Support Agent Reputation Models Interoperability

Abstract

Interaction among agents about reputation is essential to accelerate the convergence of the reputation evaluation. Semantic heterogeneity of different reputation models makes agent interaction a problem, especially in open MAS. We propose in this paper a service oriented architecture, SOARI , to deal with this problem. Namely, SOARI is composed of an external Ontology Mapping Service ( OMS ) and an agent internal Translator module. This architecture supports concept mapping and translation among reputation model ontologies to a common ontology and vice-versa, thus allowing heterogeneous agents to interoperate about reputation. We present an example of the OMS 's use, by showing the mapping of two reputation models to a common ontology. Finally, we illustrate the use of the whole SOARI architecture in a simplified electronic commerce scenario. These experiments have enabled us to analyze the limitations and advantages of a hybrid approach for heterogeneous agents interoperation.