Conversation Support
for agents, e-business, and component integration

The conversation support project is devoted to advancing and supporting conversational interactions between computers. By this we mean multi-step exchanges of correlated messages in an explicit, evolving context.

Though the name might suggest something having to do with spoken language, the essence of a conversation (in the sense we mean it) is independent of the mechanism whereby information is exchanged--e.g., people carry on conversations by email as well as by telephone.

The conversational model of component interaction

The technology proposes and implements a conversational model of component interaction. In that model, a component’s functioning is divided into two broad categories: interoperability technology and decision logic. Here, “decision logic” is a catch-all term for what is usually regarded as the true function performed by the component, regardless of how or by whom it is done. In an e-business, for example "decision logic" is often called the "business process". The interoperability technology is the software the e-business uses to communicate and interact with others, especially other e-businesses.

In the conversational model, the interoperability technology consists of two distinct parts: messaging and conversation support. Messaging is the plumbing needed to send and receive electronic communications with others. Conversation support governs the formatting of messages that are to be sent, the parsing of messages that have been received, and the sequencing constraints on exchange of multiple, correlated messages. It is a separate subsystem that mediates between the messaging system and business processes.

In machine-to-machine conversations, free-form dialogs are not really practical. Therefore e-business interactions will make frequent use of preprogrammed interaction patterns or protocols called conversation policies (CPs). CPs are the heart and soul of conversation support. A CP specifies the message formats, sequencing constraints, and timing constraints that define an interaction protocol.

Conversation policies have been a subject of active research within the software agents community, but that work has generally blended decision logic with protocol specification. For this project, we are keeping a much clearer separation between the two.