A Framework of Open Interactions based on Web Services and Semantic Web Technologies

Abstract. The design and implementation of open interaction systems (OIS) is widely recognized to be a crucial issue in the development of innovative applications on the Internet. In our past works we have pro-posed to specify the high-level component of an OIS by means of a set of artificial institutions. In this paper we describe the lower layers of a framework of open interaction, to be used as a reference for the devel-opment of an OIS: the connectivity layer, in charge of enabling an agent to send messages to other agents, and the message layer, devoted to the syntactic and semantic processing of the messages. We specify a set of conventions concerning these layers that are essential in open interac-tions: we propose conventions on the message structure, on the applica-tion independent part of the content language, and on the semantics of messages (limiting our attention, in this paper, to commissive messages). Such conventions would guarantee agent interoperability if adopted as interaction standards. Finally we present a software architecture based on Web Service and Semantic Web Technology, suitable for the actual implementation of these layers, and a demonstrative implementation.