Developing a conceptual framework for agreement technologies

As the interest in the notion of open interaction systems (i.e., software systems in which different agents achieve their goals through interaction) is increasing, the idea of runtime agreements among computational entities is becoming central; agreement technologies, thus, play a fundamental role in the development of the next generation of open interaction systems able to meet the challenges of autonomy, interaction, and mobility. However, the concept of agreement has not yet received full attention from a theoretical point of view. The goal of the project is to develop a conceptual model of the notion of agreement able to account for the many facets of this notion. The model will be translated it into suitable formalisms already adopted in Computer Science communities, such as OWL, and tested against real cases emerged in the wider framework of research on open interaction systems.