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SIMPLE: A Language for the Specification of Protocols, Similar to Natural Language

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Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems XI (COIN 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9628))

Abstract

Large and open societies of agents require regulation, and therefore many tools have been developed that enable the definition and enforcement of rules on multiagent systems. Unfortunately, most of them have been designed to be used by computer scientists and are not suitable for people with no more than average computer skills. Since more and more tools are nowadays running as cloud services accessible to anyone (e.g. Massive Open Online Courses and social networks) we feel there is a need for a simple tool that allows ordinary people to create rules and protocols for these kinds of environments. In this paper we present ongoing work on the development of a new programming language for the definition of protocols for multiagent systems, which is so simple that anyone should be able to use it. Although its syntax is strict, it looks very similar to natural language so that protocols written in this language can be understood directly by anyone, without having to learn the language beforehand. Moreover, we have implemented an easy-to-use editor that helps users writing sentences that obey the syntax rules, as well as an interpreter that can parse such protocols and verify whether they are violated or not.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk.

  2. 2.

    http://www.osmosian.com.

  3. 3.

    https://ifttt.com/.

  4. 4.

    This procedure can be implemented in a much more efficient way than presented here, but we think this is not very relevant for this paper, so we prefer to present it in a way that is easier to understand for the reader.

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Acknowledgments

Supported by the Agreement Technologies CONSOLIDER project, contract CSD2007-0022 and INGENIO 2010 and CHIST-ERA project ACE and EU project 318770 PRAISE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IIIA-CSIC, Bellaterra, Catalonia, Spain

    Dave de Jonge & Carles Sierra

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  1. Dave de Jonge
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  2. Carles Sierra
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Correspondence to Dave de Jonge .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Delft University of Technology , Delft, The Netherlands

    Virginia Dignum

  2. IIIA-CSIC , Barcelona, Spain

    Pablo Noriega

  3. Ozyegin University , Istanbul, Turkey

    Murat Sensoy

  4. University of Sao Paulo , Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Jaime Simão Sichman

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de Jonge, D., Sierra, C. (2016). SIMPLE: A Language for the Specification of Protocols, Similar to Natural Language. In: Dignum, V., Noriega, P., Sensoy, M., Sichman, J. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems XI. COIN 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9628. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42691-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42691-4_6

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