Solving power and trust conflicts through argumentation in agent-mediated knowledge distribution

Issue title: Special issue on Agent-Mediated Knowledge Management

Guest editors: J. van Diggelen and V. Dignum

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Chesñevar, Carlos I.^{a; *} | Brena, Ramón^b | Aguirre, José L.^b

Affiliations: [a] Artificial Intelligence Research Group, Universitat de Lleida, 25001 Lleida, Spain | [b] Centro de Sistemas Inteligentes, Tecnológico de Monterrey, 64849 Monterrey, N.L., México | Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: cic@eps.udl.es

Abstract: Distributing pieces of knowledge in large, usually distributed organizations is a central problem in Knowledge and Organization management. Policies for distributing knowledge and information are mostly incomplete or in potential conflict with each other. As a consequence, decision processes for information distribution may be difficult to formalize on the basis of a rationally justified procedure. This article presents an argumentative approach to cope with this problem based on integrating the JITIK multiagent system with Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP), a logic programming formalism for defeasible argumentation. We show how power relations, as well as delegation and trust, can be embedded within our framework in terms of DeLP, in such a way that a dialectical argumentation process works as a decision core. Conflicts among policies are solved on the basis of a dialectical analysis whose outcome determines to which specific users different pieces of knowledge are to be delivered.

Keywords: Defeasible argumentation, knowledge management, multiagent systems

DOI: 10.3233/KES-2006-10403

Journal: International Journal of Knowledge-based and Intelligent Engineering Systems, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 263-276, 2006