Endowing Business Artifacts with a Normative Coordination Layer

We propose to enrich the artifact-centric approach in two ways. First, by relying on the Agent-Oriented Paradigm, the tasks acting on artifacts are organized in agents, seen as autonomous loci of control, whose execution is goal-driven. Second, the business artifact model is complemented by a normative dimension. Norms are used to represent the data lifecycle in a form that is inspectable and that can be reasoned upon by agents. Agents can therefore create expectations about the behaviors of others and hence, leveraging on the norms, agents can act on an artifact so as to entice, or oblige, others to act themselves. The paper discusses the advantages and consequences of this norm-aware enrichment, and outlines a possible realization based on social commitments.