A model of requests about actions for active components in the semantic web

In this paper, we address the problem of answering formal requests about actions for active components that can be found in online services on the Internet. The components are described using a specific language and have access at runtime to a formal specification of their actions and current states. We present a formal model for requests about actions, based on the combination of speech acts and procedural types, that allows us to represent the different kinds of questions that a human user can ask about the actions, behaviour and activity of an active component. We propose answering algorithms and we illustrate them on some examples.