Led by our first-year DPhil student Jesse Wright, three poster/demo papers were accepted by ISWC 2024. Many congratulations to Jesse and his collaborators!

Jesse Wright. Here’s Charlie! Realising the Semantic Web vision of Agents in the age of LLMs

This paper presents our research towards a near-term future in which legal entities, such as individuals and organisations can entrust semi-autonomous AI-driven agents to carry out online interactions on their behalf. The author’s research concerns the development of semi-autonomous Web agents, which consult users if and only if the system does not have sufficient context or confidence to proceed working autonomously. This creates a user-agent dialogue that allows the user to teach the agent about the information sources they trust, their data-sharing preferences, and their decision-making preferences. Ultimately, this enables the user to maximise control over their data and decisions while retaining the convenience of using agents, including those driven by LLMs.

In view of developing near-term solutions, the research seeks to answer the question: “How do we build a trustworthy and reliable network of semi-autonomous agents which represent individuals and organisations on the Web?”. After identifying key requirements, the paper presents a demo for a sample use case of a generic personal assistant. This is implemented using (Notation3) rules to enforce safety guarantees around belief, data sharing and data usage and LLMs to allow natural language interaction with users and serendipitous dialogues between software agents.

Here’s Charlie can be found at arxiv.

Jesse Wright, Jos De Roo and Ieben Smessaert. EYE JS: A client-side reasoning engine supporting Notation3, RDF Surfaces and RDF Lingua

The Web is transitioning away from centralised services to a re-emergent decentralised platform. This movement generates demand for infrastructure that hides the complexities of decentralisation so that Web developers can easily create rich applications for the next generation of the internet.

This paper introduces EYE JS, an RDFJS-compliant TypeScript library that supports reasoning using Notation3 and RDF Surfaces from browsers and NodeJS.

By developing EYE JS, we fill a gap in existing research and infrastructure, creating a reasoning engine for the Resource Description Framework (RDF) that can reason over decentralised documents in a Web client.

Jesse Wright. N3.js Reasoner: Implementing reasoning in N3.js

In addition, Jesse had the following paper accepted by Semantics 2024 NeXt-generation Data Governance workshop 2024.

This paper presents a sociotechnical vision for managing personal data, including cookies, within Web browsers. We first present our vision for a future of semi-automated data governance on the Web, using policy languages to describe data terms of use, and having browsers act on behalf of users to enact policy-based controls. Then, we present an overview of the technical research required to prove that existing policy languages express a sufficient range of concepts for describing cookie policies on the Web today. We view this work as a stepping stone towards a future of semi-automated data governance at Web-scale, which in the long term will also be used by next-generation Web technologies such as Web agents and Solid.

This paper can be found at arxiv.