Specifying and Monitoring Obligations in Open Multiagent Systems Using Semantic Web Technology

In nowadays open interaction systems where autonomous, heterogeneous and self-interested agents may interact, it is crucial to be able to declaratively specify the norms that regulate the actions of the interacting parties and to be able to monitor their behaviour in order to check whether it is compliant or not with the norms. In this chapter we propose and discuss the advantages of using semantic web languages, tools, and techniques for proposing an application independent model that should be used for the declarative specification and monitoring of obligations. Those obligations are characterized by a class of activation and deactivation events, a class of content actions that may satisfy the obligation and a deadline within which an action belonging to the content class has to be performed. The main contribution of this chapter is to show how it is possible to use semantic web technologies, and in particular OWL 2 DL as formal language for the specification and monitoring of complex obligations and to study how much it is feasible to use an OWL ontology to represent the state of a dynamic open interaction system.