widespread, standardisation of ontologies, message content and message protocols will be necessary. In this paper, we present a lifecycle of a business-to-business e-commerce interaction, and show how the Semantic Web can support a service description language that can be used throughout this lifecycle. By using DAML+OIL, we develop a service description language su#ciently expressive and flexible to be used not only in advertisements, but also in matchmaking queries, negotiation proposals and agreements. We also identify which operations must be carried out on this description language if the B2B lifecycle is to be fully supported. We do not propose specific standard protocols, but instead argue that our operators are able to support a wide variety of interaction protocols, and so will be fundamental irrespective of which protocols are finally adopted.

Inductive machine learning offers techniques for discovering new knowledge from business, medical, and scientific databases. Most techniques assume that all the relevant information for discovery has been gathered and assembled into a single table or database. With multiple databases it is possible to combine features from several perspectives and thus move beyond the confines of an ontology that was fixed by the designers of a single database. We introduce WoRLD ("Worldwide Relational Learning Daemon"), a system that uses spreading activation to enable inductive learning from multiple tables in multiple databases spread across the network. We describe the paradigm and the system, provide demonstrations on synthetic data sets, and then replicate two real-world successes of automated discovery. 1 INTRODUCTION Inductive machine learning offers methods for discovering new knowledge from business, medical, and scientific databases. Although the need to learn across multiple tables has bee...

Knowledge management research focuses on the development of concepts, methods, and tools supporting the management of human knowledge. The main objective of this paper is to survey some of the basic concepts that have been used in computer science for the representation of knowledge and summarize some of their advantages and drawbacks. A secondary objective is to relate these techniques to information sciences theory and practice. The survey classifies the concepts used for knowledge representation into four broad ontological categories. Static ontology describes static aspects of the world, i.e., what things exist, their attributes and relationships. A dynamic ontology, on the other hand, describes the changing aspects of the world in terms of states, state transitions and processes. Intentional ontology encompasses the world of things agents believe in, want, prove or disprove, and argue about. Social ontology covers social settings, agents, positions, roles, authority, permanent org...

This paper describes how query formulation can be made simple and less complicated by using ontologies. It takes a brief look at several advantages of using ontologies in a distributed, heterogeneous, and dynamic information environment, such as the Internet. It also examines the construction and evaluation of an ontology-based distributed information system developed using the Java language. It discusses issues related to software tools that operate in a distributed environment, and shows how the client-server architecture and the agent technology used by the Java language can be used effectively in such environments. The software is applied to an information system for healthcare administrators, which spans hospitals, clinics, and governmental health departments. 1.

This paper describes how ontologies can be used for query formulation and semantic reconciliation in large distributed information environments. It presents a tool, written in Java, that can be used to create and browse ontologies, and construct ontology-based queries. The tool incorporates several abstraction mechanisms that enable users to manage large ontologies, which are typical of large information environments. The tool is being applied to an information system for healthcare administrators, which spans hospitals, clinics, and governmental health departments. 1.

WebKB is a public domain knowledge annotation toolkit allowing indices of any Document Element (DE) on the WWW to be built using annotations in a Knowledge Representation (KR) language: Conceptual Graphs. The language permits the semantic content and relationships to other DEs to be described precisely. Search can be initiated remotely, via a WWW-browser and/or other software. WebKB enables the document generation using inferences within the knowledge engine to assemble DEs. Additionally, the knowledge base provides an alternate index through which both query and direct hyper-link navigation can occur. This paper describes some of the key features of the toolkit and its approach to knowledge indexation. I. INTRODUCTION WebKB [13] is a public domain knowledge annotation toolkit sharing many design principles with WWW-based public annotation tools, e.g. ComMentor [18] and HyperNews [9], and WWW-based traders, e.g. AlephWeb [17], NetRepository [10] and AI-trader [16]. Despite similariti...

Abstract — The General Game Playing Competition [1] poses a unique challenge for Artificial Intelligence. To be successful, a player must learn to play well in a limited number of example games encoded in first-order logic and then generalize its game play to previously unseen games with entirely different rules. Because good opponents are usually not available, learning algorithms must come up with plausible opponent strategies in order to benchmark performance. One approach to simultaneously learning all player strategies is coevolution. This paper presents a coevolutionary approach using NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies to evolve populations of game state evaluators. This approach is tested on a sample of games from the General Game Playing Competition and shown to be effective: It allows the algorithm designer to minimize the amount of domain knowledge built into the system, which leads to more general game play and allows modeling opponent strategies efficiently. Furthermore, the General Game Playing domain proves to be a powerful tool for developing and testing coevolutionary methods.

This paper discusses the representation of large ontologies, especially in a graphical format. It describes a tool, developed using Java, that incorporates several abstraction mechanisms that can help manage such ontologies. Furthermore, it briefly analyzes possible point-and-click approaches that can be used to form queries on these ontologies.