A Critical Examination of Languages for Specifying Interaction Protocols for Decentralized Social Machines
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Important Web applications are social machines in that they they involve interoperation among autonomous parties through the Web. We particularly focus on decentralized social machines that reflect the autonomy of their participants in infrastructure that avoids a central provider or authority. A social machine can be effectively specified via an interaction protocol that specifies how participants engage with each other by sending and receiving messages. The importance of decentralization in modern applications has driven research into languages for specifying interaction protocols. However, despite their shared objectives, current languages differ significantly in their -- often complex -- technical details. We contribute a comparative evaluation of these languages over criteria geared toward social machines that incorporate three crucial aspects: (i) information, to express social meaning via instances, correlation, and integrity; (ii) flexible enactments -- to enable autonomy via concurrency and extensibility -- that are also causally valid; and (iii) asynchrony---to avoid hidden coupling. We show how the underlying abstractions and assumptions of the various languages fare on these criteria.
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