AgentO: An Ontology for Modeling Agentic AI Systems

AgentO: An Ontology for Modeling Agentic AI Systems

Abstract

Agentic AI systems are rapidly being deployed as autonomous, goal-directed entities to manage the orchestration of complex, multi-step workflows across diverse domains. Despite their growing adoption, current frameworks often lack a formalized model and architecture. Hence, many implementations remain ad-hoc, relying on simplistic data structures and monolithic designs that hinder scalability, reusability, and interoperability. This paper addresses these limitations by introducing AgentO, an OWL/RDF-based ontology and accompanying knowledge graph that formally represent the core concepts, components, and interactions that underpin agentic AI workflows. Our ontology provides a standardized vocabulary for modeling agentic patterns including agents, tasks, workflows, and resource dependencies. To build and evaluate AgentO, we developed an automated LLM-driven process and translated 66 agentic workflows from four different agentic AI frameworks. We further evaluated our approach through three real-world use cases: declarative reconstruction of agentic patterns, cross-context reuse of tasks and agents, and agentic AI workflow auditing. Our results demonstrate the potential of semantic technologies to bring structure, reusability, and transparency to agentic AI systems.

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Authors
  • Ekelhart, Andreas
  • Kurniawan, Kabul
  • Ekaputra, Fajar J.
  • Kiesling, Elmar
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Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
The Semantic Web
Divisions
Security and Privacy
Subjects
Computersicherheit
Angewandte Informatik
Event Location
Dubrovnik , Croatia
Event Type
Conference
Event Dates
May 10-14, 2026
Publisher
Springer Nature Switzerland
Page Range
pp. 298-320
Date
8 May 2026
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