Agreement Technologies - Semantic Alignment
Agreement technologies aim at developing techniques that enable software components to reach agreements on the mutual performance of services, hence supporting the development of large-scale, open distributed systems. Hence, agreement technologies propose a new paradigm for next generation distributed systems. The new paradigm is structured around the concept of agreement between computational agents. These agreements must be consistent with the normative context where they are established and permit, once accepted, that agents call for mutual services and honour them. An entity, by the fact of being autonomous, may choose whether to fulfil an agreement or not, and it should fulfil them when there is an obligation to do so derived from the standing agreements. Autonomy, interaction, mobility and openness are the characteristics that the paradigm covers from a theoretical and practical perspective. We have identified negotiation, semantic alignment and trust as the key enabling agreement technologies.
- Negotiation techniques allow agents to reach agreements on the terms of their interactions.
- Semantic alignment techniques allow agents using different ontologies to understand one another.
- Trust is the technology that complements traditional security mechanisms by relying on social mechanisms that interpret the behaviour of agents.
Semantic ---in addition to syntactic--- heterogeneity is an inherent problem for achieving interoperability in distributed systems if system components have been engineered separately and autonomously ---as in federated databases, peer-to-peer networks, choreographed web services, or multiagent systems. To guarantee an acceptable degree of interoperability in any of these systems, some sort of agreement on the semantics of the representation of the application domain is needed.
We have been investigating how to tackle semantic heterogeneity with the objective of reaching semantic agreements by means of semantic alignment, understood in a very broad sense. Hence, our research focusses on:
- mathematical foundations of semantic interoperability and integration
- ontology matching and mapping
- meaning coordination and negotiation
- interaction-situated semantic alignment
- alignment of subjective evaluations of trust
- A new form of open, coordinated knowledge sharing architecture01/01/2006 - 31/12/2008
We shall provide a unifying framework based on interaction models that are mobile in the sense that they may be transferred to other components, this being a mechanism for Web service composition and for coalition formation.
A key contribution of OpenKnowledge is to demonstrate that by shifting the emphasis to interaction (the details of which may be hidden from users) we can obtain knowledge sharing of sufficient quality for sustainable communities of practise without the barrier of complex meta-data provision prior to community formation. We ground our research in two testbed arenas: bioinformatics and emergency response.
UDT-IA Project: - Community-Building Information Technology01/01/2011 - 31/12/2013
Creating software applications that foster web-based social interaction is still very hard and currently beyond the capabilities of end-users, since highly skilled web application developers are needed. Consequently, the cost of community formation and evolution beyond those based on simple, general and stable interaction patterns is still too high. Individuals, however, looking either for new, partially formed, or already standing communities whose interactions are much more domain specific and specialised need software tools and platforms that support the formation of and the adjustment to communities, as well as the adaptation to new, perhaps dynamically evolving, events during a community’s lifespan.
CBIT aims at transcending the current level of social software applications and platforms for community building into the meta-level for which today’s applications will arise as particular instances. For this we shall approach community building as an iterative process consisting of community formation, interaction, and growth. In CBIT a community is understood as a group of peers whose interactions are defined via agreements on social contracts on behaviour, meaning, and reliability, and represented in a community charter. Consequently, community building will be subject to the mechanisms to be developed in the scope of this project for charter specification and selection, charter grounding and enactment, and charter revision and modification. To concretise this approach, we shall realise it for a community-building process that fosters collaboration in the generation of digital educational contents.
