Intention and Agreement Spaces - A Formalism

Intention spaces can be described as the implicit definition of the kinds of settlements that an agent is in principal willing to accept in order to perform a transaction in an electronic market. This intention space might, for instance, define the desired range of disk sizes or the maximum price for a computer. Explicit offers to buy or sell can then be issued or evaluated on the basis of this intention space, leading to the definition of an agreement space between several agents. The contribution of this paper is a formalism of this implicit notion of an intention and agreement space, allowing not only the explicit specification of offers but also the transformation into XML syntax as well as the definition of service operators for the agreement phase of electronic transactions.