This package and its sub-packages contain classes that support the user in creating and manipulating complex content expressio

This package and its sub-packages contain classes that support the user in creating and manipulating complex content expressions according to a given content language and ontology.

When an agent A communicates with another agent B, a certain amount of information I is transferred from A to B by means of an ACL message. Inside the ACL message, I is represented as a content expression consistent with a proper content language (e.g. SL) and encoded in a proper format (e.g. string). Both A and B have their own (possibly different) way of internally representing I. Taking into account that the way an agent internally represents a piece information must allow an easy handling of that piece of information, it is quite clear that the representation used in an ACL content expression is not suitable for the inside of an agent.

For example the information that there is a person whose name is Giovanni and who is 33 years old in an ACL content expression could be represented as the string

(Person :name Giovanni :age 33)

Storing this information inside an agent simply as a string variable is not suitable to handle the information as e.g. getting the age of Giovanni would require each time to parse the string.

Considering software agents written in Java (as JADE agents are), information can conveniently be represented inside an agent as Java objects. For example representing the above information about Giovanni as an instance (a Java object) of an application-specific class

class Person {

String name;

int age;

public String getName() {return name; }

public void setName(String n) {name = n; }

public int getAge() {return age; }

public void setAge(int a) {age = a; }

….

}

initialized with

name = “Giovanni”;

age = 33;

would allow to handle it very easily.

It is clear however that, if on the one hand information handling inside an agent is eased, on the other hand each time agent A sends a piece of information I to agent B,

1) A needs to convert his internal representation of I into the corresponding ACL content expression representation and B needs to perform the opposite conversion.

2) Moreover B should also perform a number of semantic checks to verify that I is a meaningful piece of information, i.e. that it complies with the rules (for instance that the age of Giovanni is actually an integer value) of the ontology by means of which both A and B ascribe a proper meaning to I.

The classes included in this package and its sub-packages are designed to automatically perform all the above conversion and check operations, thus allowing developers manipulating information within their agents as Java objects (as described above) without the need of any extra work.