=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-494/paper-16
|storemode=property
|title=Open Interaction System Specification and Monitoring Using Semantic Web Technology
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-494/coinpaper7.pdf
|volume=Vol-494
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/mallow/Fornara09
}}
==Open Interaction System Specification and Monitoring Using Semantic Web Technology==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-494/coinpaper7.pdf
1
Open Interaction System Specification
and Monitoring Using Semantic Web Technology
Nicoletta Fornara Università della Svizzera italiana, via G. Buffi 13, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland
Email: nicoletta.fornara@usi.ch
I. I NTRODUCTION Therefore in order to be able to define the semantics
of declarative communicative acts, we introduced in our
The design and development of open distributed inter- model other institutional concepts, like the notion of
action systems, where heterogeneous, autonomous, and institutional action, institutional power, and role. Finally
self-interested agents can interact by entering and leaving in order to constrain agents’ actions we formalized the
dynamically the system, is widely recognized to be a notion of norm and of sanction or reward that are used
crucial issue in the development of nowadays applica- for norm enforcement[12]. We model open interaction
tions on the Internet: like e-commerce applications [1], systems as a set of artificial institutions. In particular in
collaborative social systems [2], or application to support our view the definition of a specific artificial institution
the automatic management of virtual organizations [3]. consists of: (i) a component, called meta-model, which
In particular in our view the interacting agents may range includes the definition of basic entities common to the
from very complex autonomous software agents able to specification of every institution, like the concepts of
reason and to plan their actions and that behave on behalf commitment, institutional power, role, and norm, and
of their human owners, to very simple software used by the actions necessary for exchanging messages; (ii) a
human beings as an interface to interact with the system. component specific to the institution in question, which
Given that the agents are assumed to be heterogeneous includes the specification of the powers and norms that
because they may be developed by different designers apply to the agents playing roles in the institution, and
or they may be human beings, no assumptions can the definition of the concepts pertaining to the domain
be made on their internal architecture. Given that the of the interaction (for example the actions of paying or
system is open and agents may enter and leave it delivering a product, bidding in an auction, etc.).
dynamically, it is necessary to find a standard way for Regarding the language used to specify the various
specifying a communication language for the interacting components of the model we initially adopted a language
agents and for defining the context and the rules of the with an operational intuitive semantics based on the
interaction. Moreover given that the interacting agents notion of object and attribute close to object oriented
are autonomous it is necessary to find a way to regulate programming. The difficult that we experimented with
interactions so that agents may have reliable expectations this approach was in developing agents able to reason on
on the future development of the system. Furthermore their actions and able to monitor the agent’s behavior.
given that these systems will be used to enrich and We therefore proposed a formalization of the OCeAN
improve human beings interactions, it is crucial that the meta-model based on the Discrete Event Calculus [8].
proposed design approach is defined taking inspiration This approach resulted very fruitful for unambiguously
from existing studies about human interactions. specifying the concepts of our meta-model and for
Starting from these requirements in our previous being used to simulate the time evolution of an actual
works [4], [5], [6], [7], [8] we proposed a meta-model for interaction, but we experimented performance problems
the conceptual design of open interaction systems based and we did not find a simple way to interface our event
on speech act theory [9], [10] and on Searle’s theory calculus specification with an external application used
on construction of social reality [11]. In particular we to enable agents interactions, like for instance the JADE
proposed the OCeAN metamodel, which is base on the framework1 .
definition of a set of application independent concepts We therefore decide to follow a new approach that we
that have to be used in the specification of every type of plan to investigate and evaluate in the future. Our idea
interaction system. We initially proposed an agent com- is to use standard Semantic Web Technology to specify,
municative language whose semantics is based on the
notion of social commitment and temporal proposition. 1
http://jade.tilab.com/
2
to reason on, and to monitor agent’s actions. In [13] Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Sys-
we started to formalize the deontic part of the OCeAN tems (AAMAS 2002), C. Castelfranchi and W. L. Johnson, Eds.
ACM Press, 2002, pp. 1045–1052.
meta-model using OWL 2 DL2 ), SWRL rules (Semantic [2] V. Dignum, F. Dignum, and J.-J. Meyer, “An agent-mediated
Web Rule Language3 ), and a Java application, developed approach to the support of knowledge sharing in organizations,”
using OWL-API 4 and the source code of the Pellet5 Knowl. Eng. Rev., vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 147–174, 2004.
reasoner, to overcome certain expressiveness limitations [3] H. L. Cardoso and E. Oliveira, “Virtual enterprise normative
framework within electronic institutions,” in Engineering Soci-
of OWL. More precisely, we showed how it is possible eties in the Agents World V. Springer, 2004, pp. 14–32.
to specify and monitor the time evolution of social [4] N. Fornara and M. Colombetti, “Operational specification
commitment used to express conditioned obligations and of a commitment-based agent communication language,” in
Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on
prohibitions on time intervals.
Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS 2002),
The main advantages of using a decidable logical C. Castelfranchi and W. L. Johnson, Eds. ACM Press, 2002,
language like OWL to specify an open interaction sys- pp. 535–542.
tem are that Semantic Web technologies are increas- [5] ——, “Defining interaction protocols using a commitmentbased
agent communication language,” in Proceedings of the Second
ingly becoming a standard for Internet applications and International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Mul-
therefore they are supported by many reasoners (like tiAgent Systems (AAMAS 2003), J. Rosenschein, T. Sandholm,
Fact++6 , Pellet7 , or Racer8 ); moreover ontologies and M. Wooldridge, and M. Yokoo, Eds. ACM Press, 2003, pp.
520–527.
reasoning services are easily interfaced with applications
[6] N. Fornara, F. Viganò, and M. Colombetti, “Agent communica-
programmed in Java or other well known languages. tion and artificial institutions,” Autonomous Agents and Multi-
When facing this approach we discovered that there Agent Systems, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 121–142, April 2007.
may be the following main problems. Firstly the treat- [7] N. Fornara, F. Viganò, M. Verdicchio, and M. Colombetti,
“Artificial institutions: A model of institutional reality for open
ment of time: OWL has no temporal operators, in multiagent systems,” Artificial Intelligence and Law, vol. 16,
some cases it is possible to bypass the problem by no. 1, pp. 89–105, March 2008.
using SWRL rules and built-ins for comparisons, but in [8] N. Fornara and M. Colombetti, Specifying Artificial Institutions
in the Event Calculus, ser. Information science reference. IGI
any case this does not provide full temporal reasoning
Global, 2009, vol. Handbook of Research on Multi-Agent
capabilities; notice furthermore that using the OWL Systems: Semantics and Dynamics of Organizational Models,
Time Ontology9 would not be a solution, given that ch. XIV, pp. 335–366.
its axiomatization is very weak. Secondly the open- [9] J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1962.
world assumption: in many applications nor being able [10] J. R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Lan-
to infer that an action has been performed is sufficient guage. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University
evidence that the action has not been performed. We Press, 1969.
faced this second problem by using an external program [11] ——, The construction of social reality. New York: Free Press,
1995.
to simulate a closed world assumption by adding certain [12] N. Fornara and M. Colombetti, “Specifying and enforcing
closure axioms to the ontology. But there is still the norms in artificial institutions,” in Declarative Agent Languages
open problem of understanding what part of the model and Technologies VI 6th International Workshop, DALT 2008,
Revised Selected and Invited Papers, ser. LNCS, M. Baldoni,
it is better and possible to represent in the ontology in
T. Son, B. van Riemsdijk, and M. Winikoff, Eds., vol. 5397.
order to be able to reason on it and what part of the Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2009, pp. 1–17.
model it is better to represent in the external application [13] ——, “Ontology and time evolution of obligations and prohi-
because current semantic web standards do not support bitions using semantic web technology,” in Proceedings of the
Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies
its representation. DALT@AAMAS09, Budapest, Hungary, 11 May 2009, M. Bal-
doni, J. Bentahar, and M. v. R. J. Lloyd, Eds., 2009.
R EFERENCES
[1] M. Esteva, D. de la Cruz, and C. Sierra, “Islander: an electronic
institutions editor,” in Proceedings of the First International
2
http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/OWL Working Group
3
http://www.w3.org/Submission/SWRL/
4
http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/
5
http://clarkparsia.com/pellet
6
http://owl.man.ac.uk/factplusplus/
7
http://clarkparsia.com/pellet
8
http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/ r.f.moeller/racer/
9
http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/, http://www.w3.org/2006/time.rdf