Integrating Joint Behaviour and Dialogue Description

Abstract

Agents are becoming increasingly common as a means of structuringinteractive systems, due to the highly complex and concurrent natureof modern systems. The manner in which interaction between theseagents is specified is of fundamental importance, and must pay heedto expressivity and reuse concerns. There are also concerns specificto interactive systems, and in particular the need to specify andreason about user-system dialogue. We have shown previously thatthe standard model of object interaction is inadequate with respectto these concerns, and that the action model performs better withrespect to these criteria. In this paper these results are drawntogether with approaches previously taken in interactive systems.From this basis a schema calculus with interleaving semantics isproposed, which better addresses the concerns of expressivity andreuse in the interactive systems context.