A JADE-Based ART-Inspired Ontology and Protocols for Handling Trust and Reputation

Trust and reputation management play an important role in agent-based recommender systems. Although several protocols and ontologies of agents using trust and reputation has been proposed, none of them has been so extensively used and implicitly accepted by research community as those from agent reputation and trust (ART in advance) testbed. The motivation of this adaptation is to facilitate the use of ART principles in real distributed applications instead of a centralized testbed for experimentation. This paper presents an adaptation of the protocols proposed by ART testbed to a codification for the most popular agent platform: JADE. This implementation follows a coherent API with the FIPA protocols included in JADE distribution for an easy use. We also complement the behaviours of corresponding initiators and responders of the protocols with an ontology formed by a collection of concepts, predicates and agent actions that may represent as the ART application domain as any other service-oriented domain. The proposal has been designed to be applied in domains where multi-agent e-commerce solutions are needed. Future work includes the integration of this ontology and protocols in context-aware scenarios such as an airport.