In this paper, we outline the relation between Knowledge Management (KM) as an application area on the one hand, and software agents as a basic technology for supporting KM on the other. We start by presenting characteristics of KM which account for some drawbacks of today's -- typically centralized -- technological approaches for KM. We argue that the basic features of agents (social ability, autonomy, re- and proactiveness) can alleviate several of these drawbacks. A classification schema for the description of agent-based KM systems is established, and a couple of example systems are depicted in terms of this schema. The paper concludes with questions which we think research in Agent-mediated Knowledge Management (AMKM) should deal with.

In the last few years, efforts have been done towards bridging the gap between agent technology and de facto standard technologies, aiming at introducing multi-agent systems in industrial applications. This paper presents an experience done by using one of such proposals, Agent UML. Agent UML is a graphical modelling language based on UML. The practical usage of this notation has brought to suggest some refinements of the Agent UML features.

Abstract—The increasing of globalization and flexibility required to the companies has generated, in the last decade, new issues, related to the managing of large scale projects within geographically distributed networks and to the cooperation of enterprises. ICT support systems are required to allow enterprises to share information, guarantee data-consistency and establish synchronized and collaborative processes. In this paper we present a collaborative project management system that integrates data coming from aerospace industries with two main goals: avoiding inconsistencies generated by updates at the sources ’ level and minimizing data replications. The proposed system is composed of a collaborative project management component supported by a web interface, a multiagent data integration component, which supports information sharing and querying, and SOAP enabled web-services which ensure the whole interoperability of the software components. The system was developed by the University of Modena and

We propose a layered framework for the integration of syntactically, schematically, and semantically heterogeneous networked data sources. Their heterogeneity stems from different models (e.g., relational, XML, or RDF), different schemas within the same model, and different terms associated with the same meaning. We use a semantic based approach that uses a global ontology to mediate among the schemas of the data sources. In our framework, a query is expressed in terms of one of the data sources or of the global ontology and is then translated into subqueries on the other data sources using mappings based on a common vocabulary. Metadata representation, global conceptualization, declarative mediation, mapping support, and query processing are addressed in detail in our discussion of a case study. 1