Logical Systems: Towards Protocols for Web-Based Meaning Negotiation

Our thesis is that before Web-based agents can negotiate meanings, they need to agree on high-level protocols based on logical systems. The Semantic Web community is setting the stage for semantic interoperability among Web-based software agents by developing standard languages with well-defined semantics. But exactly how these languages might be used to negotiate meanings is an open question. The agent-oriented perspective of negotiation as a kind of deal-making does not seem to mesh with the perspective of Semantic Web community, which seems more inclined to fix meanings, rather than bargain over them. Fundamental to treatments of meanings on the Semantic Web is the ability of agents to perform logical inferences; therefore, any approach to Web-based meaning negotiation should, take into account those aspects of logic that have a bearing on logical inferences. Logical systems provide a general way of accounting for those aspects of an agent’s logical setup that have a bearing on inferences. An explicit taking into account of agents’ logical systems provides a suitably rich foundation on which to base protocols for meaning negotiation on the Web.