A vision on algebraic flows for declarative resource descriptions

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 intermediate resources, which are not directly exposed. To address this gap, we propose a declarative interface description that describes intermediate resources and their transformations by modeling interfaces as algebraic flows that declaratively define how intermediate 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 interaction 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.

@inproceedings{desmet_hyperagents_algebraicflows_2025,
  author = {De Smet, Jitse and Verborgh, Ruben and Taelman, Ruben},
  title = {A vision on algebraic flows for declarative resource descriptions},
  month = oct,
  booktitle = {Proceedings 2nd Workshop on Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems co-located with the 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://interface-data-description-hyperagents-2025.jitsedesmet.be/}
}