OntoTrader: An Ontological Web Trading Agent Approach for Environmental Information Retrieval

ModernWeb-based Information Systems(WIS) are becoming increasingly necessary to provide support for users who are in different places with different types of information, by facilitating their access to the information, decision making, workgroups, and so forth. Design of these systems requires the use of standardized methods and techniques that enable a common vocabulary to be defined to represent the underlying knowledge. Thus, mediation elements such astradersenrich the interoperability of web components in open distributed systems. These traders must operate with otherthird-partytraders and/or agents in the system, which must also use a common vocabulary for communication between them. This paper presents theOntoTraderarchitecture, anOntological Web Tradingagent based on the OMG ODP trading standard. It also presents the ontology needed by some system agents to communicate with the trading agent and the behavioral framework for the SOLERESOntoTraderagent, anEnvironmental Management Information System(EMIS). This framework implements a “Query-Searching/Recovering-Response” information retrieval model using a trading service, SPARQL notation, and the JADE platform. The paper also presents reflection, delegation and, federation mediation models and describes formalization, an experimental testing environment in three scenarios, and a tool which allows our proposal to be evaluated and validated.