Problem-solving methods provide reusable architectures and components for implementing the reasoning part of knowledge-based systems.

We developed a new version of The VideoAnnEx, a.k.a. IBM MPEG-7 Annotation Tool, for collaborative multimedia annotation task in a distributed environment. The VideoAnnEx assists authors in the task of annotating video sequences with MPEG-7 metadata. Each shot in the video sequence can be annotated with static scene descriptions, key object descriptions, event descriptions, and other lexicon sets. The annotated descriptions are associated with each video shot or regions in the keyframes, and are stored as MPEG-7 XML file. We proposed a forum to collaboratively annotate semantic labels to the NIST TRECVID 2003 development set. From April to July 2003, 111 researchers from 23 institutes worked together to associate 198K of ground-truth labels (433K after hierarchy propagation) to 62.2 hours of videos. This large set of valuable ground-truth data is publicly available to the research community, especially for multimedia indexing and retrieval, semantic understanding, and supervised machine learning fields. 1.

We describe the ingredients of an intelligent agent (a broker) for configuration and execution of knowledge systems for customer requests. The knowledge systems are configured from reusable problemsolving methods that reside in digital libraries on the Internet. The approach followed amounts to solving two subproblems: (i) the configuration problem which implies that we have to reason about problem-solving components, and (ii) execution of heterogeneous components. We use CORBA as the communication infrastructure.

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The World-Wide Web is changing the nature of software development to a distributive plug & play process. This requires a new way of managing software by so-called intelligent software brokers. The aim of the European IBROW3 project is to develop an intelligent brokering service that enables third party knowledge-component reuse through the World-Wide Web. Suppliers provide libraries of knowledge components adhering to some standard, and customers can consult these libraries -- through intelligent brokers -- to configure a knowledge system suited to their needs by selection and adaptation. IBROW3 integrates research on heterogeneous databases, interoperability and web technology with knowledge-system technology and ontologies. The aim is to develop a broker that can handle web requests for classes of knowledge system (e.g. diagnostic systems) by accessing libraries of reusable problem-solving methods on the Web, and selecting, adapting and configuring these methods in accor...

The Semantic Web is intended for knowledge sharing among agents as well as humans. To achieve this goal, Ontologies, which express knowledge in a certain vitality as well as in a machine interpretable form, were introduced. The growing demand for facilitating deployment and reuse of Ontologies has increased the need to develop adequate criteria to measure the quality of Ontologies conceptualizing a domain. Our research is motivated by the urgent needs of rigorous mechanisms which analyze ontological features from diverse perspectives and determine their quality levels. This paper presents the methodology representing qualitative and quantitative analysis of Ontologies and their classification. The Ontological tools, which were implemented based on the methodology, are proposed to provide multiple interfaces to humans and agents, thus supporting Ontology Engineering process. The proposed framework has gone through a great deal of testing and evaluation processes in the context of a real application of Ontology analysis and classification.

In this paper, we will discuss the proposed recommendation (March 1999) for an RDF Schema Specification and compare the approach taken in this specification to conventional meta data models. We will point out several pecularities in the RDF schema specification compared to more conventional approaches, which are basically due to the dual role of properties such as subclass and domain both as primitive constructs used in the definition of the RDF schema specification and as specific instances of RDF properties. We then discuss an approach for specifying RDF schemas, which distinguishes between a set of specific properties, which are needed in the RDF meta model itself, and conventional properties. Finally we show how we use this modified RDF meta model in a structured hypertext system (the KBS Hyperbook System), which uses RDF annotations not only for informational purposes, but also for structuring hypertext according to the semantic relationships recorded by these RDF annotations.

. Developing software by selecting, adapting, combining, and integrating existing components instead of starting the system development process from scratch has become a key factor in economic software development. However, such a development process has to deal with four problems: First, components must be selected. Second, components must be adapted because they neither fit precisely the task that should be performed nor do they necessarily fit well to other selected components. Third, components must be combined and their interaction must be established. Fourth, it may be necessary to decompose complex problems into smaller subtasks for which components can be found. In this case, a general system frame must be established that enables to form an integrated system out of separate components. In this paper, we present our means to deal with these problems: brokers, adapters, connectors, and task structures. Although we discuss our approach in the context of problem-solving methods, s...

This paper aims to provide limited knowledge awareness to a conventional DBMS (Database Management Systems). This goal is achieved by extending an off-the-shelf DBMS (Postgresql in our case) in such way that it becomes ontology aware. The concept of ontology is used in our approach as a way of formalizing knowledge and relationships among objects in a domain of interest. Our solution is compounded by two main pieces: an external knowledge server and a set of functions to extend the DBMS. We argue that our solution is both powerful in the sense of supporting knowledge retrieval in the queries, and generic, in the sense that it can be deployed in any DBMS with the support for user-defined functions. Two application domains that can benefit from our approach are data mining and ad hoc query processing in hypothesis exploration environments (e.g. medical research). We also argue that our approach is original in how it pushes a conventional DBMS towards having features like the ones expecte...

1 In this paper we compare two different ontologies of the legal domain: Valente's functional ontology of law, and the ontology of Van Kralingen and Visser. We present criteria for a comparison of the ontologies and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. 1. Introduction This article reports on a study into explicit conceptualisations of the legal domain, now widely referred to as (legal) ontologies. We compare two such ontologies, namely Valente's law functions and Van Kralingen and Visser's frame-based ontology. Both ontologies are intended to be (re)usable in the creation of legal knowledge systems. Our aim is to compare the ontologies, to assess their merits and thus, to contribute to future work on legal ontologies. We start by briefly discussing each ontology (section 2). Thereafter, we introduce a set of ontology-comparison criteria (section 3) and compare the ontologies using these criteria (section 4). Finally, we discuss the results, draw conclusions and provide suggestions...