According to a first aspect of the present invention, a computer implemented method, a computer system and a computer program product for creating an ontological conversational agent, the method including creating an ontological specification of a domain of discourse of the ontological conversational agent, and creating a description of one or more goals of the ontological conversational agent. In an embodiment, the ontological description includes classes of entities, their associated attributes and relationships between the classes of entities. In an embodiment, the ontological description includes language-related descriptions. In an embodiment, the method, computer system and computer program product further includes creating a description of services of the ontological conversational agent. An embodiment including receiving a first utterance from a user during a conversation, identifying a first intent based on the first utterance, and recognizing a first goal of the one or more goals, based on the first intent.