Tech Reports

ULCS-05-010

Information-seeking agent dialogs with permissions and arguments

Sylvie Doutre, Peter McBurney, Michael Wooldridge and William Barden

Abstract

Many distributed information systems require agents to have appropriate authorization to obtain access to information. For some applications, such as those in medicine, authorization may be granted in exceptional cases even to agents without the necessary permissions, provided they can provide an appropriate justification for having access. We may consider these agent interactions to be information-seeking dialogs with the agent seeking the information and the agent controlling access to it engaged in argument together over data access. We present a denotational semantics for such dialogs, drawing on Tuple Centers (programmable Tuple Spaces). We illustrate our approach with an example in medicine, and describe an implementation we have created using TuCSoN.

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