Reflecting on ontologies towards ontology-based agent-oriented software engineering

“Ontology” in association with “software engineering” is becoming commonplace. This paper argues for the need to place ontologies at the centre of the software development lifecycle for multi agent systems to enhance reuse of software workproducts as well as to unify agent-based software engineering knowledge. The paper bridges the state-of-the-art of ontologies research from Knowledge Engineering (KE) within Artificial Intelligence and Metamodelling within Software Engineering (SE). It presents a sketch of an ontology-based Multi Agent System (MAS) methodology discussing key roles on ontologies and their impact of workproducts, illustrating these in a MAS software development project for an important application that utilizes dynamic web services composition.