In their paper on "Using Explicit Ontologies in KBS Development", van Heijst and colleagues seem to take for granted Bylander and Chandrasekaran 's hypothesis on the strong dependence of knowledge represesentation on the nature and the inference strategy of the problem at hand, the socalled interaction problem: Representing knowledge for the purpose of solving some problem is strongly affected by the nature of the problem and the inference strategy to be applied to the problem. [Bylander and Chandrasekaran 1988] The fact that the van Heijst and colleagues don't attempt to explore in detail the arguments sustaining this hypothesis is particularly puzzling, since they admit that it contradicts one of the main assumptions of their well-known KADS approach [Schreiber et al. 1993], namely the separation between domain knowledge and problem-solving knowledge. They report two reasons brought by Bylande

. Managing patients in a shared-care context is a knowledge intensive activity. To support cooperative work in medical care, computer technology should either augment the capabilities of individual specialists and enhance their ability of interacting with each other and with computational resources. Thus, a major shift is needed from centralized first generation Hospital Information Systems to distributed environments composed of several interconnected agents, cooperating in maintaining a full track of the patient clinical history and supporting health care providers in all the phases of the patient management process. In this paper we describe a methodology for implementing a network of cooperating software agents aimed at improving the health care delivery process. Moreover, a preliminary computational prototype exploiting the proposed methodology is also illustrated. 1 Introduction The management of a patient in a shared-care context is a knowledge intensive activity. Health care ...

ONIONS helps terminological ontology construction from existing, contextually heterogeneous terminologies. It is a methodology for integrating the context-dependent conceptualizations underlying conceptually heterogeneous terminology systems. We describe an application of this methodology to the medical domain with an example extracted from the UMLS system. We also give a short description of the current ontology library produced by means of ONIONS, and of its metaontology.

. Managing patients is a knowledge intensive activity requiring a high interoperability among the health care professionals involved. To support cooperative work in medical care, computer technology should therefore either augment the capabilities of individual specialists and enhance their ability of interacting with each other and with computational resources. However, despite the efforts spent in the Artificial Intelligence research field in the past years for developing innovative tools, there are still very few cases of systems which are proficiently used on a routinary basis for providing health care related services. One way to overcome those limitations is to redesign the set of software tools in order that they be more appropriated for an interoperable environment, and perhaps the most promising approach nowadays is based on the so called distributed computing paradigm applied to Artificial Intelligence. In this paper we describe a methodology for implementing a network of coo...

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents an overview of the course taken by knowledge engineering while passing from the single-agent to the multi-agent perspective. Section 3 focuses on the main collaboration modalities that can be found in agent-based organizations. Section 4 deals with the individual agent and MAS models we have adopted. In Section 5 the way is analyzed in which explicit ontologies can be collected into libraries and configured in order to be used as mediating mechanisms for collaboration. Section 6 addresses the encapsulation of ontological and also terminological services into dedicated agents, namely ontology and terminology servers.