Knowledge Level Support for Programming Agents to Interact in Regulated Online Forums

Nesrine Hafiene, Luis G. Nardin, Olivier Boissier

Abstract: The Web is populated by autonomous agents that act on behalf of users to perform tasks on the Web. These agents are required to interact with online systems to achieve their goals. However, they are usually designed to interact with specific online systems, preventing them from interacting with those whose structure, interaction methods, and regulations are a priori unknown. We propose a means to overcome this limitation by representing the online systems’ resources and regulations that agents can use to make decisions and act. Our approach can be split into two parts. First, we introduce a knowledge layer structured along with the Multi-Agent Oriented Programming approach to describe Web resources and their regulations using ontology. Second, we introduce an agent that uses this knowledge layer for reasoning and acting in compliance with the regulations towards achieving its goals. We use the online forum as a running example to highlight the applicability and usefulness of our approach.