Decentralized semantic coordination of interconnected entities via belief propagation

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Vouros, George

Affiliations: Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Piraeus, 85134, Greece. E-mail: georgev@unipi.gr

Abstract: Agents in inherently distributed and open settings cannot be assumed to share an agreed ontology of their common task environment. To interact effectively, these agents need to establish semantic correspondences between their ontology elements. However, the correspondences computed by two agents may differ due to (a) differences in their ontologies, (b) different alignment methods used, and due to (c) different information one makes available to the other. Although semantic coordination methods have already been proposed for the computation of subjective correspondences between agents (i.e. correspondences from the viewpoint of a specific agent), this paper proposes a decentralized method for communities, groups and arbitrarily formed networks of interconnected agents to reach semantic agreements on subjective ontology elements’ correspondences, via belief propagation: Agents detect disagreements on correspondences via feedback they receive from others, and they revise their decisions with respect to their preferences on correspondences and the semantics of ontological specifications. This work addresses this problem by means of a distributed extension of the max-plus algorithm. Experimental results from a large number of networks of varying complexity show the strengths of the proposed approach.

Keywords: Ontology alignment, belief propagation, semantic agreements, agreement technologies

DOI: 10.3233/AIC-140624

Journal: AI Communications, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 617-634, 2015