Apply ontology and agent technology to construct virtual observatory

The need to deal with abundance and heterogeneous information is apparent in the astronomy community. The virtual observatory (VO) concept is the astronomical community's response to alleviate this problem and Web services serve as one of the most important VO enabling technologies. However, one of the limitations of Web services is the lack of semantic description of its content, thus prohibits its ability to understand the queries and its inference capabilities. This study proposes to develop a conceptual framework based on multi-agent systems and ontology technology, in order to create a VO with semantically enriched Web services. Intelligent agents represent: (1) users to submit requests (2) perform semantic matching in between users' requests and Web services registered within agent platform, and (3) activate a serial of Web services. The capabilities offered by multi-agent systems to query and invoke semantically enriched Web Services is also exploited in this study. To validate the proposed framework, an illustration example is implemented in JADE agent platform to demonstrate how the proposed framework operates and how it benefits the research regarding to auroral images. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.