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stigLD: Stigmergic Coordination of Linked Data Agents

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Bio-Inspired Computing: Theories and Applications (BIC-TA 2021)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1566))

Abstract

While current Semantic Web technologies are well-suited for data publication and integration, the design and deployment of dynamic, autonomous and long-lived multi-agent systems (MAS) on the Web is still in its infancy. Following the vision of hypermedia MAS and Linked Systems, we propose to use a value-passing fragment of Milner’s Calculus to formally specify the generic hypermedia-driven behaviour of Linked Data agents and the Web as their embedding environment. We are specifically interested in agent coordination mechanisms based on stigmergic principles. When considering transient marker-based stigmergy, we identify the necessity of generating server-side effects during the handling of safe and idempotent agent-initiated resource requests. This design choice is oftentimes contested with an imprecise interpretation of HTTP semantics, or with rejecting environments as first-class abstractions in MAS. Based on our observations, we present a domain model and a SPARQL function library facilitating the design and implementation of stigmergic coordination between Linked Data agents on the Web. We demonstrate the efficacy our modeling approach in a Make-to-Order fulfilment scenario involving transient stigmergy and negative feedback.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We emphasise that this conception is not in violation with HTTP semantics [14, sections4.2.1,4.2.2] [15].

  2. 2.

    For example via dct:spatial and dct:temporal links.

  3. 3.

    https://jena.apache.org/documentation/query/writing_functions.html.

  4. 4.

    https://jena.apache.org/.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/BMBF-MOSAIK/StigLD-Demo.

  6. 6.

    http://mosaik.dfki.de.

  7. 7.

    – as well as a production task into the respective machine’s task queue –.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the MOSAIK project (grant no. 01IS18070-C).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarland Informatics Campus D 3 2, Saarbrücken, Germany

    René Schubotz, Torsten Spieldenner & Melvin Chelli

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  1. René Schubotz
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Correspondence to René Schubotz .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

    Linqiang Pan

  2. Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, Taiyuan, China

    Zhihua Cui

  3. Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, Taiyuan, China

    Jianghui Cai

  4. Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

    Lianghao Li

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Schubotz, R., Spieldenner, T., Chelli, M. (2022). stigLD: Stigmergic Coordination of Linked Data Agents. In: Pan, L., Cui, Z., Cai, J., Li, L. (eds) Bio-Inspired Computing: Theories and Applications. BIC-TA 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1566. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1253-5_13

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