Abstract. Ontologies are viewed as increasingly important tools for structuring domains of interests. In this paper we propose a reference ontology of business models using concepts from three established business model ontologies; the REA, BMO, and e3-value. The basic concepts in the reference ontology concern actors, resources, and the transfer of resources between actors. Most of the concepts in the reference ontology are taken from one of the original ontologies, but we have also introduced a number of additional concepts, primarily related to resource transfers between business actors. The purpose of the proposed ontology is to increase the understanding of the original ontologies as well as the relationships between them, and also to seek opportunities to complement and improve on them.
The Agent Society framework that we have developed distinguishes between the mechanisms though which the structure and global behavior of the model is described and coordinated, and the aims and behavior of the serviceproviders (agents) that populate the model. In this framework contracts are used to integrate the top-down specification of organizational structures with the autonomy of participating agents. In this paper we introduce LCR, a very expressive logic for describing interaction in multi-agent systems. We also show how LCR behaves in contrary-to-duty situations common to deontic logic frameworks. LCR makes it possible to check whether agents in an agent society follow some desired interaction patterns and whether desired social states are preserved by agent activity. LCR is used as a formal basis for the framework for agents societies that we are developing.
The development of multi-agent systems calls for modeling primitives that are able to represent communication, interaction, roles and other concepts that characterize multi-agent systems. Such modeling primitives are usually not provided by (single) agent languages. Furthermore, models of organizations must incorporate the collective characteristics of the domain. We propose a conceptual framework for agent societies, consisting of three interrelated models, that distinguishes between organizational and operational aspects of the domain. Contract rules specify commitments between agents and society concerning role enactment, and commitments between agents concerning interaction.
In the dominant view of knowledge bases (KB's), a KB is a set of facts (atomic sentences) and integrity constraints (IC's). An IC is then a sentence which must at least be consistent with the other sentences in the KB. This view obliterates the distinction between, for example, the constraint that age is a natural number (which is true of the universe of discourse (UoD) but may be false in a particular implementation of a KB), and the constraint that a class must have precisely one teacher (which is false of the UoD if a class actually has two teachers). The second constraint is called deontic and constrains the UoD; the first constraint is a necessary truth of the UoD and does not constrain the UoD. Instead, it constrains the implementation of the KB. We argue that the distinction between necessary and deontic IC's is relevant for KB modeling and that it imposes a more complicated modeling discipline on the KB designer than hitherto realized. We show that both types of constraints can be specified in the single framework provided by a deontic variant of dynamic logic, which has the added advantage of being able to specify dynamic constraints as well. We give a simple example to illustrate the difference between dynamic and static specification of deontic IC's, and a non-trivial example of a KB specification with static, dynamic and deontic constraints.
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