Bridging BDI Multi-Agent Systems and the Semantic Web Through the Triples-to-Beliefs-to-Triples Paradigm

Well-established agent engineering frameworks from the state-of-the-art, due to their outdated designs, are not thought to work in the perspective of a shared semantics, nor do they provide an agent modeling language and environment that integrates seamlessly with them. This is especially challenging in dynamic, distributed environments where new concepts, data sources, and agents can emerge at runtime, potentially leading to semantic conflicts or inconsistencies. This paper proposes the novel paradigm Triples-to-Beliefs-to-Triples (T2B2T), which is being ontologically described, enabling multi-agent systems with seamless and consistent integration with the Semantic Web. In order to validate the approach, this paper proposes also a framework called SEMAS implementing the T2B2T paradigm, which provides a bridge between the mental attitudes Beliefs-Desire-Intentions (BDI) and triples describing a domain with an abstraction over the SPARQL language that feeds the inference process of agents. This enables more sophisticated forms of reasoning in the closed-world assumption, by supporting predicates without any limitation on arity and compositional structures, allowing also the employment of decentralized functions for the dynamic generation of new triples not included in the origin ontologies. As a case-study, SEMAS was employed on decision-making applied to academic mobility with real data coming from the SCOPUS database, demonstrating how the generated inferences can be tailored to specific conditions of individual agents, and how new triples can be inferred to capture the impact of agents' decisions on the evolution of the knowledge domain.