The design and development of open distributed interaction systems, where heterogeneous, autonomous, and self-interested agents can interact exchanging knowledge and negotiating services is widely recognized to be a crucial issue in the development of nowadays applications in the area of e-commerce, e-business, e-government, and e-collaboration.
In order to reach interoperability among agents we need to have a standard way of specifying a communication language for the interacting agents, the context of the interaction, and the rules of the interaction. In order to be able to develop flexible and robust systems we need to formally define the semantics of those concepts with the goal to develop agents able to reason at run-time on their actions and plan their activities and in order to be able to monitor agents interaction to enforce rules compliance and create an expectation on the agents behaviour.
Given that our idea is that open interaction systems may be modelled as a set of artificial institutions, in this seminar I will briefly present the OCeAN (Ontology, CommitmEnts, Authorizations, Norms) model for the conceptual specification of artificial institutions that our group developed taking inspiration from speech act theory and Searle’s theory on construction of social reality. In particular I will present our work on the representation and monitoring of obligations and prohibitions using semantic web technology.