Timothy J Norman

OWL-POLAR is an OWL2-based language for describing policies. Policies (aka, norms) are system-level principles of ideal activity that are binding upon the components of that system. Depending on the nature of the system itself, policies may serve to control, regulate or simply guide the activities of components.

We hope to publically release tools for authoring OWL-POLAR policies and to support reasoning such as consistency checking in the next few months. Do get in touch if you're interested.

Key publications:

• M. Sensoy, T. J. Norman, W. W. Vasconcelos, and K. Sycara. OWL-POLAR: Semantic policies for agent reasoning. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Semantic Web Conference, volume 6414 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 679�–695. Springer-Verlag, 2010.

OWL-POLAR is being used in the ITA project, dot.rural and PolicyGrid.

Ontological Logic Programming (OLP), a novel approach that combines logic programming with ontological reasoning. The proposed approach enables the use of ontological terms (i.e., individuals, classes and properties) directly within logic programs. The interpretation of these terms are delegated to an ontology reasoner during the interpretation of the program. Unlike similar approaches, OLP makes use of the full capacity of both the ontological reasoning and logic programming.

OLP is released under open source licence through SourceForge.

Key publications:

• M Sensoy, G. de Mel, W. W. Vasconcelos, and T. J. Norman. Ontological logic programming. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics, 2011.
• M. Sensoy, W. W. Vasconcelos, and T. J. Norman. Flexible task resourcing for intelligent agents. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, pages 465-472, 2010.

MADPlan, which stands for Multi-Agent Domain planner, is a graph-based planner that is built on the notions of lifted planning graph, constraint network and conflict-directed backjumping. The result is a planner that makes use of a lifted planning graph which, although it captures the search space, is mainly used to guide the search through the network of exclusivity relations and binary constraints. The planner, during the construction of a grounded plan, interleaves causal reasoning with resource reasoning through a single search method that also decouples the two.

MADPlan was developed by Dionysis Kalofonos. Download MADPlan version 1.4.14.

Key publications:

• D. Kalofonos and T. J. Norman. Dealing with superfluous numbers of agents. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, Multiagent Planning Workshop, 2008.

If you find MADPlan useful, then do let us know.

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