Agent Protocols for Social Computation

Abstract. Despite the fact that social computation systems involve interaction mechanisms that closely resemble well-known models of agent coordination, current applications in this area make little or no use of the techniques the agent-based systems literature has to offer. In order to bridge this gap, this paper proposes a data-driven method for defining and deploying agent interaction protocols that is entirely based on using the standard architecture of the World Wide Web. This obviates the need of bespoke message passing mechanisms and agent platforms, thereby facilitating the use of agent coordination principles in standard Web-based applications. We describe a prototypical implementation of the architecture and experimental results that prove it can deliver the scalability and robustness required of modern social computation applications while maintaining the expressiveness and versatility of agent interaction protocols