Representation and monitoring of commitments and norms using OWL

Monitoring the temporal evolution of obligations and prohibitions is a crucial aspect in the design of open interaction systems. In this paper we regard such obligations and prohibitions as cases of social commitment with starting points and deadlines, and propose to model them in OWL, the logical language recommended by the W3C for Semantic Web applications. In particular we propose an application-independent ontology of the notions of social commitment, temporal proposition, event, agent, role, and norm, that can be used in the specification of any open interaction system. We then delineate a hybrid solution that uses the OWL ontology, SWRL rules, and a Java program to dynamically monitor the temporal evolution of social commitments, taking into account the elapsing of time and the actions performed by the agents interacting within the system.