A First Step toward the Knowledge Web: Interoperability Issues among Conceptual Graph Based Software Agents

Abstract. As soon as Web documents embed knowledge in a format processable by computers, it is expected that knowledge-based services will be offered on-line, through the Web. These applications will query the Web to seek the information relevant to their task. Knowledge providers will host that knowledge and will make it available to these various applications. Agent technology is probably best suited to implement knowledge servers. This paper sketches how conceptual graphs (CG) based software agents could play the role of knowledge providers; as an example, it uses a situation where some agent must answer a query sent by some other agent. In doing so, this paper shows how interoperability problems between communicating conceptual graph based systems can be detected automatically. It also shows how semantic constraints can be used to implement semantic filters, filters required to control, on a semantic level, the information that is exchanged between communicating systems.