Flow control policies are important in data-flow, work-flow, transaction systems and software design. Previous work in this area concentrates either on modelling security aspects of information flow control or applying flow control policies in some specific application domain. These models permit either permissions or prohibitions for flows and normally are based on a specific meta-policy (usua...

The paper describes the design and implementation of an independent, third party contract monitoring service called Contract Compliance Checker (CCC). The CCC is provided with the specification of the contract in force, and is capable of observing and logging the relevant business-to-business (B2B) interaction events, in order to determine whether the actions of the business partners are consis...

Norm-aware agents are able to reason about the obligations, permissions and prohibitions that affect their operation. While much work has focused on the creation of such norm-aware agents, less effort has been placed on enabling system designers and users to understand the interactions between norms. Providing designers with such an understanding can aid in eliminating redundant norms and error...

In a series of 5 auditory preference experiments, 120 5-month-old infants were presented with Approval and Prohibition vocalizations in infant-directed (ID) and adult-directed (AD) English, and in ID speech in nonsense English and 3 unfamiliar languages, German, Italian, and Japanese. Dependent measures were looking-time to the side of stimulus presentation, and positive and negative facial aff...

This paper describes the Contract Expression Language (CEL), currently being developed at the industry consortium Content Reference Forum. The CEL is an XMLbased language designed to express contractual agreements between different parties for the purposes of capturing and communicating contractual information, and facilitating contract execution and enforcement by machines with respect to gran...

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 applica...

The paper studies bilateral contracting between N agents and one principal, whose trade with each agent generates externalities on other agents. It examines the effects of prohibiting the principal from (i) coordinating agents on her preferred equilibrium, and (ii) making different contracts available to different agents. These effects depend on whether an agent is more or less eager to trade w...