Joint perception in agent communication

Abstract

Correctness of agent communication requires that the communicating agents share a common ontology. Most of the ontology merging approaches assume that there is a global, "god's eye" view which is a combination of the concepts in the ontology of the individual agents. These approaches admit that the agents may have different views and try to resolve the differences within the limits of the global view which contains only the concepts based on the individual perceptions of the agents. In this paper we introduce the notion of joint perception in order to enrich the available concepts in the global view and we introduce the notion of conceptualization based on joint perception in order to enable the agents to resolve the differences of their views by introducing new concepts. We propose an incremental ontology negotiation protocol for the conceptualization based on joint perception and demonstrate it in a blocks world. With this work we develop new insights into ontology merging and negotiation for agent communication by defining a formal realization proposal for emergent semantics.