@inproceedings{cybenko:functional,
    author = {George Cybenko and Guofei Jiang},
    title = {Matching Conflicts: Functional Validation of Agents},
    booktitle = {AAAI Workshop of Agent Conflicts},
    year = {1999},
    month = {July},
    pages = {14--19},
    publisher = {AAAI Press},
    copyright = {AAAI Press},
    address = {Orlando, Florida},
    group = {agents, actcomm, coabs},
    url = {http://agent.cs.dartmouth.edu/papers/cybenko:functional.ps.gz},
    keyword = {agent, functional validation},
    abstract = {In most working and proposed multiagent systems, the problem of
identifying and locating agents that can provide specific services is a major
problem of concern. A broker or matchmaker service is often proposed as a
solution. These systems use keywords drawn from application domain ontologies
to specify agent service, usually framed within some some sort of knowledge
representation language . However, we believe that keywords and ontologies
cannot be defined and interpreted precisely enough to make broking or
matchmaking among agents sufficiently robust in a truly distributed,
heterogeneous , multiagent computing environment. This creates matching
conflicts between a client agents' requested functionality and a service
agents' actual functionality . We propose a new form of interagent
communication, called functional validation, specially designed to solve such
matching conflicts. In this paper we introduce the functional validation
concept, analyze the possible situations that can arise in validation
problems and formalize the mathematical framework around which further work
can be done.}
}