. Problem-solving methods provide reusable architectures and components for implementing the reasoning part of knowledge-based systems. The Unified Problem-solving Method description Language UPML has been developed to describe such architectures and components to facilitate their semiautomatic reuse and adaptation. This paper sketches the components and connectors provided by UPML. 1. Introduction Problem-solving methods (PSMs) for knowledge-based systems (KBSs) (cf. Schreiber et al., 1994; Benjamins & Fensel, 1998) decompose the reasoning task of a KBS in a number of subtasks and inference actions that are connected by knowledge roles. Therefore PSMs are a special type of software architectures: software architectures for describing the reasoning part of KBSs. Several problem solving method libraries are now available. The IBROW 3 project (Benjamins et al., 1998) has been set up with the aim of enabling 2 THE COMPONENT MODEL OF UPML IN A NUTSHELL semiautomatic reuse of PSMs. Thi...

In this article we review knowledge representation formalisms that lend themselves to the representation of capabilities of intelligent agents. The aim of representing capabilities is, of course, that we want to reason about them. The reasoning task we are most interested in is capability brokering, i.e. the task of finding an agent which has a capability that can be used to address a given problem. Thus, the first area we review here is agent cooperation and communication from which the problem originates.

. We describe an automatic approach to the selection of problem solving libraries based on semantic matching. Problem solving libraries are specified exploiting UPML an architectural description language specialized for knowledge based systems. UPML allows a designer to specify the internal structure and the competence of complex problem solving libraries. This semantic information is used to select libraries which are suitable to solve a given problem exploiting competence matching. In this paper we introduce UPML and we present and discuss an approach to a decidable competence matching rule. 1 Introduction One of the main goals of the knowledge engineering research community is to develop methods and mechanisms which facilitate the reuse and the sharing of the knowledge that has been already formalised and embedded in specific applications (Motta et al. 1999). An essential aspect of this knowledge concerns the problem solving method that have to be adopted to compute the so...

. Problem-solving methods provide reusable architectures and components for implementing the reasoning part of knowledge-based systems. The Unified Problem-solving Method description Language UPML has been developed to describe such architectures and components to facilitate their semiautomatic reuse and adaptation. This paper sketches the components and connectors provided by UPML. 1. Introduction Problem-solving methods (PSMs) for knowledge-based systems (KBSs) (cf. Schreiber et al., 1994; Benjamins & Fensel, 1998) decompose the reasoning task of a KBS in a number of subtasks and inference actions that are connected by knowledge roles. Therefore PSMs are a special type of software architectures: software architectures for describing the reasoning part of KBSs. Several problem solving method libraries are now available. The IBROW 3 project (Benjamins et al., 1998) has been set up with the aim of enabling 2 THE COMPONENT MODEL OF UPML IN A NUTSHELL semiautomatic reuse of PSMs. ...

It has been 13 years since the first version of Protégé was run. The original tool was a small application, aimed mainly at building knowledge-acquisition tools for a few very specialized programs (it grew out of the ONCOCIN project and the subsequent attempts to build expert systems for protocol-based therapy planning). The most recent version, Protégé-2000, incorporates the Open Knowledge Base Connectivity (OKBC) knowledge model, is written to run across a wide variety of platforms, supports customized user-interface extensions, and has been used by over 300 individuals and research groups, most of whom are only peripherally interested in medical informatics. Researchers not directly involved in the project might well wonder how Protg evolved, what are the reasons for the repeated reimplementations, and how to tell the various versions apart. In this paper, we give an overview of the evolution of Protg, examining the methodological assumptions underlying the original Protégé system and discussing the ways in which the methodology has changed over time. We conclude with an overview of the latest version of Protégé, Protégé-2000.