Extending Ontology to Behaviour in Communities of Interoperating Information Systems Agents

This paper argues that a community of interoperating information systems agents requires an ontology not only of the objects in the world, the agents themselves and the message types available; but also of the complex behavioural protocols through which tasks are accomplished. The universe of these applications is described using formal upper ontologies and the material ontology of institutional fact, and a method of representing a subsumption lattice of behavioural protocols using the process algebra representation of finite state machines is adapted from the literature. This behavioural subtype structure is shown to be compatible with the other aspects of the ontology. The resulting system is applied to a community of agents