Assessment of OWL and FIPA-SL as semantic language

Communication language is necessary for two parties to hold a meaningful conversation either between humans or agents. Explicit communication semantics are often considered essential for rich interaction between multi-agent systems. This paper describes the issues and trade-offs between OWL, (ontology Web language) and SL (semantic language) when used as semantic language for communication between agents. The comparison is done based on the factors of knowledge representation and expressive power. First part of the paper describes the expressiveness of communication between agents when SL is used as content language. Then the benefits of OWL are described before clarifying the pitfalls and issues in using it as content language for communication between agents. After the in-depth analysis of the two languages we emphasis that due to OWL compatibility and interoperability issues and lack of expressing modalities. OWL will not be a better option to be used as content language when compared with SL in agent communication language (ACL) message structure.