Diploma Thesis, TU-Vienna, 2014

The coordination of distributed software agents can be a complex task, especially if the agents are developed by different parties. Space-based computing - a distributed shared memory concept for data-driven communication - tries to simplify the development of such application scenarios by decoupling the communication from time and location. Semantic Web enables the development of domain models and knowledge with platform-independent web technologies. To improve the interoperability in heterogeneous systems, Semantic XVSM - the framework developed in this thesis - enables the use of semantic models and knowledge inside the spaces-based computing framework XVSM. The use of Semantic Web technologies in XVSM offers new and powerful query capabilities for selecting communications items and their enrichment with implicit information.

 

With Semantic XVSM it became possible to formulate the coordination logic with platform independent, standardized languages, and to manage this logic at run time by using standard operations of XVSM. The coordination logic describes the routing of data in XVSM. In the past, certain projects already combined Semantic Web technologies with space-based computing to a semantic tuple space. This thesis concentrates on the development of a solid foundation for further frameworks, and stresses the exclusive use of W3C standards. Many features of these standards can be used unrestricted. The latest versions of the Semantic Web technologies offer new design options for a semantic tuple space framework.

 

In this thesis, the design of Semantic XVSM and its reference implementation, Semantic MozartSpaces, are presented. Some of the challenges to solve were the transaction handling between XVSM and a triplestore, and the full conformity of the semantic coordinator with the coordinator staging concept of XVSM. A use case application that solves a problem in a multi agent system is presented. The differences of Semantic XVSM to native XVSM, to previous projects, and to triplestore are evaluated. Some application scenarios are also described.