Understanding Permissions through Graphical Norms

Norm-aware agents are able to reason about the obligations, permissions and prohibitions that affect their operation. While much work has focused on the creation of such norm-aware agents, less effort has been placed on enabling system designers and users to understand the interactions between norms. Providing designers with such an understanding can aid in eliminating redundant norms and errors in norm specifications, while enhancing user understanding can increase the trust placed in a system. In this paper we make use of conceptual graph based semantics to provide a graphical representation that is designed to enhance the understanding of the interactions between different types of norms. More specifically, permissions derogate obligations and prohibitions, and the latter two norm types interact by conflicting with each other. Tracking these interactions in standard symbolic norm representations is difficult given a large set of norms, yet our work allows for the easy understanding of whether a permission causes obligation or prohibition derogation.