The Emergence of Norms via Contextual Agreements in Open Societies

This paper explores the emergence of norms in agents societies when agents play multiple -even incompatible- roles in their social contexts simultaneously, and have limited interaction ranges. Specifically, this article proposes two reinforcement learning methods for agents to compute agreements on strategies for using common resources to perform joint tasks. The computation of norms by considering agents playing multiple roles in their social contexts has not been studied before. To make the problem even more realistic for open societies, we do not assume that agents share knowledge on their common resources. So, they have to compute semantic agreements towards performing their joint actions. %The paper reports on an empirical study of whether and how efficiently societies of agents converge to norms, exploring the proposed social learning processes w.r.t. different society sizes, and the ways agents are connected. The results reported are very encouraging, regarding the speed of the learning process as well as the convergence rate, even in quite complex settings.

Combining Ontologies with Correspondences and Link Relations: The E-SHIQ Representation Framework

Combining knowledge and beliefs of autonomous peers in distributed settings, is a ma- jor challenge. In this paper we consider peers that combine ontologies and reason jointly with their coupled knowledge. Ontologies are within the SHIQ fragment of Description Logics. Although there are several representation frameworks for modular Description Log- ics, each one makes crucial assumptions concerning the subjectivity of peers knowledge, the relation between the domains over which ontologies are interpreted, the expressivity of the constructors used for combining knowledge, and the way peers share their knowledge. However in settings where autonomous peers can evolve and extend their knowledge and beliefs independently from others, these assumptions may not hold. In this article, we moti- vate the need for a representation framework that allows peers to combine their knowledge in various ways, maintaining the subjectivity of their own knowledge and beliefs, and that reason collaboratively, constructing a tableau that is distributed among them, jointly. The paper presents the proposed E-SHIQ representation framework, the implementation of the E-SHIQ distributed tableau reasoner, and discusses the efficiency of this reasoner.