Abstract
Referral networks are a kind of P2P system consisting of autonomous agents who seek and provide services, or refer other service providers. Key applications include service discovery and selection, and knowledge sharing. An agent seeking a service contacts other agents to discover suitable service providers. An agent who is contacted may autonomously ignore the request or respond by providing the desired service or giving a referral. This use of referrals is inspired by human interactions, where referrals are a key basis for judging the trustworthiness of a given service. The use of referrals differentiates such networks from traditional P2P information sharing systems, which are based on request flooding. Not only does the use of referrals enable an agent to control how its request is processed, it also provides an architectural basis for four kinds of interaction policies. InterPol is a language and framework supporting such policies.
InterPol provides an ability to specify requests with hard and soft constraints as well as a vocabulary of application-independent terms based on interaction concepts. Using these, InterPol enables agents to reveal private information and accept others’ information based on subtle relationships. In this manner, InterPol goes beyond traditional referral and other P2P systems in supporting practical applications. InterPol has been implemented using a Datalog-based policy engine for each agent. It has been applied on scenarios from a (multinational) health care project. The contribution of this paper is in a general referrals-based architecture for information sharing among autonomous agents, which is shown to effectively capture a variety of privacy and trust requirements of autonomous users.
We thank National Science Foundation (grant ITR-0081742) for their partial support.
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Udupi, Y.B., Singh, M.P. (2010). Information Sharing among Autonomous Agents in Referral Networks. In: Joseph, S.R.H., Despotovic, Z., Moro, G., Bergamaschi, S. (eds) Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing. AP2PC 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5319. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11368-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11368-0_2
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