Semantic technologies for open interaction systems

Open interaction systems play a crucial role in agreement technologies because they are software devised for enabling autonomous agents (software or human) to interact, negotiate, collaborate, and coordinate their activities in order to establish agreements and manage their execution. Following the approach proposed by the recent literature on agent environments those open distributed systems can be efficiently and effectively modeled as a set of correlated physical and institutional spaces of interaction where objects and agents are situated. In our view in distributed open systems, spaces are fundamental for modeling the fact that events, actions, and social concepts (like norms and institutional objects) should be perceivable only by the agents situated in the spaces where they happen or where they are situated. Institutional spaces are also crucial for their active functional role of keeping track of the state of the interaction, and for monitoring and enforcing norms. Given that in an open distributed and dynamic system it is fundamental to be able to create and destroy spaces of interaction at run-time, in this paper we propose to create them using Artificial Institutions (AIs) specified at design time. This dynamic creation is a complex task that deserves to be studied in all details. For doing that, in this paper, we will first define the various components of AIs and spaces using Semantic Web Technologies, then we will describe the mechanisms for using AIs specification for realizing spaces of interaction. We will exemplify this process by formalizing the components of the auction Artificial Institution and of the spaces created for running concrete auction

Using OWL 2 DL for expressing ACL content and semantics

The design and implementation of open interaction systems is widely recognized to be a crucial issue in the development of innovative applications on the Internet. In this paper we pursue the goal of enhancing interoperability and openness in open interaction systems by systematic use of web standards. We propose a way of using the semantic web language OWL 2 DL to represent both the content of an ACL message, whose structure is compatible with FIPA-ACL, and the meaning of the whole message, adopting a commitment-based semantics, in such a way that OWL reasoning on message meaning is made possible. To this purpose we specify a number of ACL conventions regarding the domain independent components of the content language and the semantics of messages; we describe a set of supporting OWL ontologies, and exemplify our proposal with the analysis of a commissive message: a promise to perform a certain action within a given deadline if certain conditions hold. We then describe a demonstrative prototype of a system where those conventions are concretely implemented that is based on Web Service technologies (WSDL, SOAP, and HTTP for message transport)