We address the problem of associating access policies with datasets and how to monitor compliance via policy-carrying data. Our contributions are a formal model in first-order logic inspired by normative multi-agent systems to regulate data access, and a computational model for the validation of specific use cases and the verification of policies against criteria. Existing work on access policy identifies roles as a key enabler, with which we concur, but much of the rest focusses on authentication and authorization technology. Our proposal aims to address the normative principles put forward in Berners-Lee’s bill of rights for the internet, through human-readable but machine-processable access control policies.

Normative multi-agent systems offer the ability to integrate social and individual factors to provide increased levels of fidelity with respect to modelling social phenomena, such as cooperation, coordination, group decision making, and organization, in both human and artificial agent systems. An important open research issue refers to group norms, that is, norms that govern groups of agents. Depending on the interpretation, group norms may be intended to affect the group as a whole, each member of a group, or some members of the group. Moreover, upholding group norms may require coordination among the members of the group. We have identified three sets of agents affected by group norms, namely, (i) the addressees of the norm, (ii) those that will act on it, and (iii) those that are responsible for ensuring norm compliance. We present a formalism to represent these, connecting it to a minimalist agent organisation model. We use our formalism to develop a reasoning mechanism that enables agents to identify their position with respect to a group norm to further support agent autonomy and coordination when deciding on possible courses of action.

Most normative systems make use of explicit representations of norms (namely, obligations, prohibitions, and permissions) and associated mechanisms to support the self-regulation of open societies of self-interested and autonomous agents. A key problem in research on normative systems is that of how to synthesise effective and efficient norms. Manually designing norms is time consuming and error prone. An alternative is to automatically synthesise norms. However, norm synthesis is a computationally complex problem. We present a novel online norm synthesis mechanism, designed to synthesise compact normative systems. It yields normative systems composed of concise (simple) norms that effectively coordinate a multiagent system (MAS) without lapsing into overregulation. Our mechanism is based on a central authority that monitors a MAS, searching for undesired states. After detecting undesirable states, the central authority then synthesises norms aimed to avoid them in the future. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through experimental results.

This paper proposes to integrate an argumentation framework with techniques from Temporal Constraint Satisfaction. Temporal constraints are thus embedded into legal argumentation to account for temporal aspects of legal reasoning. Through the accommodation of temporal constraints, the validity of arguments and of their conclusions is made relative to the time-points when the applied norms are alive, according to the adopted temporal perspective. A fixed-point semantics and an associated dialogue game are given.

Many organizations depend on critical sensory information to achieve their tasks. As the number of those tasks increases, efficient determination and allocation of required resources in sensor networks become crucial. In this paper, we propose means to describe tasks semantically with their requirements and constraints so that software agents can reason about those tasks and determine what type of sensor resources they may need. Based on the semantic description and reasoning mechanisms, we propose a distributed agent-based approach to efficiently allocate sensor resources to tasks. Our evaluation of the proposed approach shows that not only it enables fully automated determination and allocation of resources for tasks, but also the resulting allocation is efficient and close to optimum.

The benefits of Service Oriented Architectures for business are well recognised, however defining the correct composition of services for a particular business process can be very challenging. In this paper we present the ALIVE approach to composing Web services to meet business goals. Our approach involves the use of agents to enact plans of actions which achieve organisational goals, where each action specifies what should be achieved as opposed to which service to use. When enacting an action, agents use a matchmaking process to determine services that can be used to achieve the desired effects, intelligently handling any errors that may occur. The action plans are based on an organisation model, allowing the set of actions available to the plan synthesis mechanism to be tailored to the goal being targeted at that specific time, further reducing the planning search space.

Service-oriented computing is the "new wave" emerging from the growing up of web services and its adoption of elements of semantic web technology. More sophistication, in response to business requirements, does of course not make it easier to use or to control. In particular business processes demand resilience and (real-time) adaptation in the face of changing business requirements, incorporation of alternative services and finding suitable substitutes when those needed are not available. The EU-funded ALIVE project is prototyping ideas, driven by commercial and industrial uses cases, that utilize research in organizational modelling, software agents, model-driven engineering, artificial intelligence, semantic web and web services to construct tools and demonstrators to address these needs. This tutorial will focus on a use case from the ALIVE project (in one of the domains of crisis management, communications, or information services), discuss the requirements that arise from it and then explore it from the three perspectives that characterize the ALIVE approach: organizations, coordination and services, all illustrated by the innovative tools that have been developed during the project.

In the Semantic Web, inconsistencies in OWL on- tologies may easily occur. Existing approaches ei- ther identify the minimally unsatisfiable sub-ontologies or calculate the maximally satisfiable sub-ontologies. However practical problems remain; it is not clear which axioms or which parts of axioms should be se- lected for repair, and how to repair those axioms. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing a fine-grained approach to resolving unsatisfiable ontolo- gies. We revise the axiom tracing technique first pro- posed by Baader and Hollunder, so as to track which parts of the problematic axioms cause the unsatisfiabil- ity. Moreover, we support ontology users in rewriting problematic axioms. In order to minimise the impact of changes and prevent unintended entailment loss, harm- ful and helpful changes are identified and provided as guidelines. Based on the methods described we present a preliminary version of an interactive debugging tool and demonstrate its applicability in practice.

Engineering individual components of a multi-agent system and their interactions is a complex and error-prone task in urgent need of methods and tools. Prototyping is a valuable technique to help software engineers explore the design space while gaining insight and a "feel" for the dynamics of the system; prototyping also allows engineers to learn more about the relationships among design features and the desired computational behaviour. In this paper we describe an approach to building prototypes of large multi-agent systems with which we can experiment and analyse results. We have implemented an environment embodying our approach. This environment is supported by a distributed platform that helps us achieve controlled simulations.

In this paper we introduce and justify the use of high-level specifications for synthesising and managing Web sites. Ours is a declarative approach employing computational logic for representing information and knowledge and also for generating the actual site in a format suitable for browsing. Additionally, our specifications contain definitions of logic-based agents that are constructed as part of the synthesis of the Web site specification and can be employed to automate the maintenance of parts of the site.