Rule Responder Agents Framework and Instantiations

Abstract

This chapter introduces Rule Responder and its applications. RuleResponder is a framework for specifying virtual organizations as semantic multiagent systems that support collaborative teams. It provides the infrastructure for rule-based collaboration between the distributed members of such a virtual organization. Human members of an organization are assisted by (semi-)autonomous rule-based agents, which use Semantic Web rules to describe aspects of their owners' derivation and reaction logic. To implement different distributed system/agent toplogies with their negotiation/coordination mechanisms Rule Responder instantiations employ three core classes of agents -Organizational Agents (OA), Personal Agents (PAs), and External Agents (EAs). The OA represents goals and strategies shared by its virtual organization as a whole, using a rulebase that describes its policies, regulations, opportunities, etc. Each PA assists a group or person of the organization, semi-autonomously acting on their behalf by using a local knowledge base of rules defined by the entity. EAs can communicate with the virtual organization by sending messages to the public interfaces of the OA. EAs can be human users using, e.g., Web forms or can be automated services/tools sending messages via the multitude of transport protocols of the underlying enterprise service bus (ESB) middleware. The agents employ ontologies in their knowledge bases to represent semantic domain vocabularies, normative pragmatics and pragmatic context of conversations and actions, as well as the organizational semiotics.

Choreographing agent encounters in the Semantic Web using rules

“…Concerning interoperability, Rule Responder [4] is quite similar to EMERALD. It builds a serviceoriented methodology and a rule-based middleware for interchanging rules in virtual organizations, as well as negotiating about their meaning.…”

Principles of the SymposiumPlanner Instantiations of Rule Responder

“…OAs can act as a single point of entry to the managed sets of local PAs to which requests by EAs are disseminated. This allows for efficient implementation of various mechanisms of making sure the PAs functionalities are not abused (security mechanisms) and making sure privacy of entities, personal data, and computation resources is respected (privacy & information hiding mechanisms) [3]. The selection logic for the dissemination of queries to PAs is described by RAM and OA selects responsible agents with a SPARQL query.…”

“…It thus extends the Semantic Web towards a Pragmatic Web infrastructure with collaborative rulebased agent networks realizing distributed inference services, where independent agents engage in conversations by exchanging messages and cooperate to achieve shared goals [3]. Rule Responder's architecture realizes a system of personal agents (PAs), computational agents (CAs), and organizational agents (OAs), accessed via external agents (EAs), on top of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) communication middleware.…”