Automated information management via abductive logic agents

This paper describes an approach for managing information organised in networks of interconnected nodes. The nodes may be heterogeneous and distributed over a computer network, and nodes and links between them may be added and deleted dynamically as the information networks evolve over time. The highly dynamic and distributed nature of these information networks poses problems of effective generation and maintenance, so that given properties (or meta-data) are satisfied as the networks evolve. The paper investigates the use of abductive logic (software) agents for the generation and maintenance of such networks. The agents rely upon a symbolic representation of networks and meta-data via abductive logic programs and make use of the reasoning engine that abductive logic programs are equipped with for checking as well as enforcing the properties represented by the meta-data.