Back
2024COM008
Public access from
18/10/2026
Doctoral thesis

A framework for automatic monitoring of norms and agreements concerning digital assets in the web of data

Show more…
  • 2024

PhD: Università della Svizzera italiana

Artificial intelligence
Normative multi-agent systems
Norms
Policies
Rules
Human-computer interaction
Semantic web technologies
English In today’s digital economy, a significant portion of human activities relies on digital devices and assets. However, it is insufficient to make digital assets public without specifying constraints on their usage and access. The problem is that lacking a license or agreement does not grant the unrestricted right to manipulate such data. While licenses and agreements can be expressed in human-readable formats, the growing exchange of digital assets necessitates more formal and machine-readable mechanisms. These mechanisms facilitate machine-to-machine interactions and enable valuable services such as advanced resource searches based on licenses, aggregation of resources under different licenses, and automatic verification of normative or legal relations within the chain of interactions among data producers, publishers, and consumers. To provide these services effectively, it is crucial not only to propose the syntax of a formal language for expressing licenses, norms, and agreements but also to establish formal semantics for automated reasoning on these constraints. In this thesis, we mainly propose a new model of norms called T-Norm (where T stands for temporal) which offers a flexible and robust approach to regulating actions with temporal constraints, allowing norm designers to formalize their norms using semantic web technologies to enhance the model’s expressiveness and reasoning capabilities. This thesis provides a comprehensive overview of the cumulative thesis, consisting of four papers that contribute to the fields of Normative Multi-agent Systems and HumanComputer Interaction. Three papers are contributions to the Normative Multi-agent Systems Community. Chapter 2 proposes the T-NORM model, a formalization of relational norms with temporal constraints. This model, published in the Proceedings of the 25th International Workshop on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems (COINE) in 2021, introduces temporal constraints, uses Semantic Web Technologies, and offers operational semantics, making norms machinereadable. Chapter 3 continues the work on the T-Norm model by presenting a methodology for formalizing norms in Multi-agent Systems. This work was published in 19th European iv Conference on Multi-agent Systems (EUMAS 2022), it addresses the gap in facilitating the usage of the T-Norm model. Chapter 4 builds on previous work, proposing a rich set of norm types that could be used to study the expressive power of different formal models of norms and to compare them, and refine the methodology with sections devoted to the induction of normative power and the formalization of exceptions and permissions. This paper has been published in the journal SN Computer Science, published by Springer Nature. Chapter 5 shifts focus to digital fashion, discussing privacy concerns in the increasing use of digital technologies in the fashion field. It highlights challenges in customer privacy and proposes the use of Semantic Web Technologies and W3C Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) for transforming privacy policies into machine-readable structures. The chapter also stresses the importance of policy monitoring and outlines components for automatic monitoring. Chapter 6 concludes the thesis and proposes possible future work perspectives that could impact positively to the future of W3C Open Normative Multi-agent Systems (NorMAS) community. Overall, the thesis contributes significantly to Normative Multi-agent Systems and Human-Computer Interaction, providing valuable insights, methodologies, and models for formalizing norms and addressing privacy concerns in the digital fashion domain.
Collections
Language
  • English
Classification
Computer science and technology
License
License undefined
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1329802
Statistics
Document views: 39 File downloads:
  • 2024COM008.pdf: 0