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Article Excerpt
Abstract. In this paper we present an executable approach to model interactions between agents that involve sensitive, privacy-related information. The approach is formal and based on deontic, epistemic and action logic. It is conceptually related to the Belief-Desire-Intention model of Bratman. Our approach uses the concept of sphere as developed by Waltzer to capture the notion that information is provided mostly with restrictions regarding its application. We use software agent technology to create an executable approach. Our agents hold beliefs about the world, have goals and commitment to the goals. They have the capacity to reason about different courses of action, and communicate with one another. The main new ingredient of our approach is the idea to model information itself as an intentional agent whose main goal it is to preserve the integrity of the information and regulate its dissemination. We demonstrate our approach by applying it to an important process in the insurance industry: applying for a life insurance.
In this paper we will: (1) describe the challenge organizational complexity poses in moral reasoning about informational relationships; (2) propose an executable approach, using software agents with reasoning capacities grounded in modal logic, in which moral constraints on informational relatio nships can be modeled and investigated; (3) describe the details of our approach, in which information itself is modeled as an intentional agent in its own right; (4) test and validate it by applying it to a concrete 'hard case' from the insurance industry; and (5) conclude that our approach upholds and offers potential for both research and practical application.
Key words: action logic, deontic, epistemic, insurance, privacy, software agents
Problem description
Some of the most pressing ethical issues involving the handling of sensitive information are to be found in complex organizations in which many people are engaged in different roles dealing with distributed information. Each has his particular set of right, obligations, sources of information and misinformation, and so forth. The whole complex of informational relationships and interests becomes very hard to oversee. As Van den Hoven and Lokhorst (2002) note:
"... manual reasoning quickly gets overwhelmed. How should one
delegate responsibilities, safeguard the flow of sensitive
information, protect privacy, and so on, in today's complex
organizational environments? Reasoning about such issues may be
trivial so long as one is looking at the level of the individual
agents, but the totality may be of mind-boggling complexity." p. 287
Information pervades every corner of life. Life is unthinkable without the technologies that have been developed to deal with all the data that we produce. Companies, private citizens and governmental organizations all deal with the use, application and distribution of data, but they do so from different perspectives. When the multitudes of roles that are involved are also taken into account, the complexity is very daunting indeed. The complexity arises from the numbers and fragmentation. The challenge it poses to moral reasoning arises from the fact that we cannot just extrapolate our moral reasoning from the individual-to-individual level to the organizational level. We do not know for sure that our moral reasoning still applies there. Moreover, we have at least an intuitive notion that it might not be applied without modification. In large organizations we separate tasks and the obligations and rights associated with them, while we distribute subsets of information that were originally provided as wholes, governed by specific sets of conditions and moral restrictions that were not designed with a view to the later partitioning.
With the rising intensity and complexity of data exchange, the need for instruments to control the use of data, to ensure its proper use and to prevent misuse becomes more and more important. Legislative measures are being developed and implemented to this purpose. But given the scale (unimaginable numbers of data transaction are being carried out each second) and scope (many transactions cross borders) it is unlikely that this will suffice.
The challenge for both practitioners and academic researchers alike is to find tools that abstract from the overwhelming detail while they are at the same time sufficiently rich to reflect the enormous complexity. In this paper, we propose to bring together several threads of research from various fields in an attempt to provide an approach that is (a) formal yet practicable, (b) can deal with complexity, and (c) is executable. This approach can be used by researchers to set up experiments and to investigate, for example, emergent behavior in large organizations; it can also be followed by practitioners to set up environments in which the handling of information is more secure than when it is only governed by paper-based rules.
Solution
In our paper we present an executable approach to model interactions between agents that involve sensitive, privacy-related information. The approach is formal, based on deontic, epistemic and action logic. It is conceptually related to the Belief-Desire-Intention model (BDI model) of Bratman (1987). We add to our approach the concept of a sphere as developed by Walzer (1983) to capture the notion that information is provided mostly with restrictions regarding its application. We use software agent technology to create our executable approach. This serves two purposes. One, it enables academic research on a scale that cannot be achieved through armchair philosophy. Simply because the numbers are too big. In addition, preparing a theory for implementation is real challenge because it forces one to think of all elements that have been subsumed under the ceteris paribus clause, have been forgotten, etc. Two, it provides venues to operational application outside the academic realm.
Our agents hold beliefs about the world, have goals and commitments, form intentions. They have the capacity to reason about different courses of action, and can communicate with one another across any number of network domains. The key element of our approach is the modeling of information itself as an (intentional) agent in its own right, whose main goal it is to preserve the integrity of the information and regulate its dissemination.
Modeling and implementation
We use different forms of modal logic to formalize information relationships. These forms have been brought together in DEAL, deontic epistemic action logic (Van den Hoven and Lokhorst 2002). DEAL draws upon several, well-known and widely accepted modal logics. We extend it here with the notion of spheres, which captures the fact the information has not the same status in different situations. Information acquired in one situation cannot just be re-used or distributed to different situations. However sophisticated, such a logic framework alone, however, cannot deal with complexity and is not executable either. The key to dealing with both complexity and execution is the same: providing a computer-based implementation of the logic. Using the computer to execute the logic potentially provides us with a means to handle real-life complexity. If and when proven satisfactory the same technique can be used for implementation and execution in practice. All this is easier said than done, though.
We propose to use agent technology (Russell 2003; Wooldridge 2000, 2002) as paradigm for our executable framework. It provides concepts that fit nicely to the situations that we would like to investigate: individuals in a particular capacity dealing with information, sharing it with other individuals who may or may not apply, re-use, distribute that information, and so forth. This solution is scalable and executable as it runs as software on computers, the very environments where information is produced and stored. The implementation is done using a particular software package for constructing software agents, JACK (AOS 2004). In addition to being based on the BDI-model it provides a good fit with modalities of DEAL. The fit, however, is not complete, obligations not being an explicit part of JACK. The addition of obligations is not problematic since they can be seen as an extension to the BDI model (Broersen et al. 2001; Dastani et al. 2001a, b).
Conceptual aspects
In addition to the above generic implementation aspects, we add three aspects of a conceptual nature. One, we maintain that in informational relationships all events that set moral reasoning and activities in motion can be categorized as being of two types: (a) requests for information, and (b) changes in data. Two, the meaning of...
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