Institutional Robotics and Norms in Multi-agent Systems

Recently, a lot of effort is being made to research “agreement technologies”. As (almost) everything may be represented and implemented by semantic rules, one may call them “semantic technologies”. However, it is not very specific as we cannot give meaning to everything in short term. Then, accepting the specific name, we accept the research is about agreements.

In my opinion, agreements are just norms resulting from negotiation (then agreed) and different from laws (imposed norms).

By norms, I mean rules describing how to behave and how to be. There are a lot of works studying how the first ones emerge and implementing them in multi-agent systems. The last ones are ontological rules specifying how something has to be in order to be related to others. For instance, to be considered a female mammal (and be related to other mammals), an animal has to possess mammary glands among other conditions. A social example would be, to join certain high society club, you must be either rich or famous (the latter notions also need to be specified with semantic rules).

Then, agreements and semantic alignment can also be seen as the negotiated creation and modification of ontological and behavioral rules. As Virtual organisations (and Electronic Institutions) may be seen as the enforcement of such rules, these “agreement technologies” can be reduced to negotiation that changes norm representation and enforcement. However, we expect negotiation (even including argumentation) to be regulated by some ontological and behavioral rules.

Thus, in my opinion, all these topics may also be reduced to (meta-)norms on how to change norms. Then, another possible name for that research effort may be “meta-norm technologies”.

I will reveal more on “meta-norm technologies” in my next paper, so please stay tuned.

Cheers!