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Ruben Verborgh

A Vision on Algebraic Flows for Declarative Resource Descriptions

Jitse De Smet, Ruben Verborgh, and Ruben Taelman

In the age of agentic systems, correct autonomous data management is increasingly critical. Agents need to discover what resources exist and how to interact with them, but existing interface description frameworks that could provide such support either leave too much open to interpretation or fail to model underlying resources, which are not directly exposed. To address this gap, we propose a declarative description that describes underlying resources and their transformations by modeling interfaces as algebraic flows that declaratively define how underlying resources are exposed, derived, and manipulated. We detail our vision by walking through an example use case that showcases the various problems agents have when interacting with data interfaces and incrementally present our solution of modeling how data flows within the system. Our approach shows that interface developers can express their systems using familiar query languages, while enabling autonomous agents to reason about the consequences of actions and determine required operations to manipulate resources safely and predictably. This makes deterministic interactions with complex, asymmetric information interfaces possible. Looking ahead, we aim to formalize this approach into a theoretically sound framework with a proof-of-concept implementation. Additionally, we identify promising avenues for integrating policy-aware semantics and privacy-preserving interface disclosure.

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Published in 2025 in Proceedings of the Workshop on Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{desmet_hyperagents_2025,
  author = {De Smet, Jitse and Verborgh, Ruben and Taelman, Ruben},
  title = {A~Vision on Algebraic Flows for Declarative Resource Descriptions},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems},
  editor = {Ciortea, Andrei and Collier, Rem and Gandon, Fabien and Harth, Andreas and Zimmermann, Antoine},
  year = 2025,
  month = may,
  series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
  volume = 4084,
  issn = {1613-0073},
  pages = {95--102},
  publisher = {CEUR},
  url = {https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4084/short11.pdf},
}

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ACM
Jitse De Smet, Ruben Verborgh, and Ruben Taelman. 2025. A Vision on Algebraic Flows for Declarative Resource Descriptions. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), CEUR, 95–102.
APA
De Smet, J., Verborgh, R., & Taelman, R. (2025). A Vision on Algebraic Flows for Declarative Resource Descriptions. In A. Ciortea, R. Collier, F. Gandon, A. Harth, & A. Zimmermann (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems (Vol. 4084, pp. 95–102). CEUR.
IEEE
J. De Smet, R. Verborgh, and R. Taelman, “A Vision on Algebraic Flows for Declarative Resource Descriptions,” in Proceedings of the Workshop on Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems, 2025, vol. 4084, pp. 95–102.
LNCS
De Smet, J., Verborgh, R., Taelman, R.: A Vision on Algebraic Flows for Declarative Resource Descriptions. In: Ciortea, A., Collier, R., Gandon, F., Harth, A., and Zimmermann, A. (eds.) Proceedings of the Workshop on Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems. pp. 95–102. CEUR (2025).
MLA
De Smet, Jitse, et al. “A Vision on Algebraic Flows for Declarative Resource Descriptions.” Proceedings of the Workshop on Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems, edited by Andrei Ciortea et al., vol. 4084, CEUR, 2025, pp. 95–102.