An Ontology for Value Awareness Engineering

Abstract

The field of value awareness engineering claims that intelligent software agents should be endowed with a set of capabilities related to human values, enabling them to identify value-aligned outcomes and, ultimately, to choose their behaviour in value-aware manner. In this work we develop an ontology that links many of the models and concepts that have been proposed in relation to computational value awareness, so as to be able to formalize in a common language the various heterogeneous research proposals in the field. Specifically, we illustrate its capability for describing multi-agent systems from the value-awareness engineering perspective through several case studies grounded in concrete approaches from literature. The ontology, implemented in OWL and extended with SWRL rules, is evaluated following scenarios of the NeOn Methodology and is interconnected with relevant ontologies in the Semantic Web.