Open Interaction Systems: an approach Based on Artificial Institutions and Reasoning Agents with an application to Collaborative Environments
People
(Responsible)
(Co-responsible)
Abstract
This research project is in the area of open interaction systems, that is, of software systems in which different programs (regarded as autonomous agents, which may freely enter or leave the system) try to achieve their individual goals by interacting with other agents according to a shared set of rules. In our past works we have argued that open interaction systems can be specified as artificial institutions, that is, as systems in which agents play certain roles, are empowered to perform certain institutional actions, and are subject to a set of norms regulating interactions.The practical design and implementation of such systems involves continuing our past research to solve the problem to develop a framework that allows one to design software agents able to interact with different open systems (for example different running auctions) without being reprogrammed. This requires that software agents are able to access a formal description of the interaction system, including the context of the interaction and the norms regulating the system, and reason at runtime on how to reach their goals. To solve this problem we plan to adopt the W3C standards for the Semantic Web, which in the foreseeable future will be based on the ontology language OWL 1.1, based on the powerful Description Logic SROIQ(D+), integrated with the rule language SWRL, a version of Datalog for the Semantic Web.