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Model-driven engineering provides abstractions and notations for improving the understanding and for supporting the modelling, coding, and verification of applications for specific domains. Ontologies, on the other hand, provide formal and explicit definitions of shared conceptualisations and enable the use of semantic reasoning. Although these areas have been developed by different communities, important synergies can be achieved when both are combined. These advantages can be explored in the development of multi-agent systems, given their complexity and the need for integrating several components that are often addressed from different angles. This work investigates how to apply ontologies for agentoriented software engineering. Initially, we present a new modelling approach where multiagent systems are designed using the proposed OntoMAS ontology. Then, we describe techniques, implemented in a tool, to help programmers bring their concepts into code and also generate code automatically from instantiated ontology models. Several advantages can be obtained from these new approaches to model and code multi-agent systems, such as semantic reasoning to carry out inferences and verification mechanisms. But the main advantage is the unified high (knowledge) level specification language that allows modelling the three dimensions that are united in the JaCaMo framework so that systems specifications can be better communicated across developing teams. The evaluations of these proposals indicate that they contribute with the different aspects of agent-oriented software engineering, such as the specification, verification, and programming of these systems.

In this paper we present CooL-AgentSpeak, an extension of AgentSpeak-DL with plan exchange and ontology services. In CooL-AgentSpeak, the search for an ontologically relevant plan is no longer limited to the agent's local plan library but is carried out in the other agents' libraries too, according to a cooperation strategy, and it is not based solely on unification and on the subsumption relation between concepts, but also on ontology matching. Belief querying and updating also take advantage of ontological reasoning and matching.