Centralized search process requires that the whole collection reside at a single site. This imposes a burden on both the system storage of the site and the network traffic near the site. It thus comes to require the search process to be distributed. Recently, more and more Web sites provide the ability to search their local collection of Web pages. Query brokering systems are used to direct queries to the promising sites and merge the results from these sites. Creation of meta-information of the sites plays an important role in such systems. In this article, we introduce an ontology-based web site mapping method used to produce conceptual meta-information, the Vector Space approach, and present a serial of experiments comparing it with Nave-Bayes approach. We found that the Vector Space approach produces better accuracy in ontology-based web site mapping. Keywords Distributed collections, information brokers, text categorization, IR agents. 1. INTRODUCTION The World Wide Web (WWW)...

Peer-to-Peer networks continue to grow in popularity. However network resource discovery still remains a substantial problem within them. In this paper we will cover some of the more popular current solutions to this problem. We will then propose a mobile agent based solution to allow for dynamic network resource discovery. Keywords: Mobile Agents, Resource Discovery, Peer-to-Peer.

Wireless communication systems beyond the third generation will be diverse. It can be expected that several different radio technologies as well as several classes of mobile devices running a variety of applications will be deployed, while the Internet Protocol (IP) will play the role of the unifying architectural component. To cope with the described diversity, networking paradigms like programmable / active networking should be incorporated into the vision of "beyond 3G" wireless / mobile networks. Particularly, we propose to evaluate agents as one enabling technology for active wireless / mobile networking. Therefore, we highlight some key properties of agents and discuss their potential advantages, disadvantages and tradeoffs for a "beyond 3G" network scenario.

: This paper describes a Teleservice Centre for Design. The System is considered to support an Industrial designer starting at the very early stages of the design process up to the production of the prototype. Special emphasis is placed on the logical architecture of the system. An overview of the provided services and the components of the user interface and an outlook on further work complete this paper. INTRODUCTION The development of innovative products stems from a company's ability to create new product related knowledge, whereby human resources and computers are used in an integrated manner. A precondition for this is the meaningful use of efficient technologies to co-ordinate knowledge. However, new knowledge is only converted into concepts through the interaction of human creativity and experts who are masters of their professional domain. Coaching in knowledge on design promotes the dissemination of new knowledge for the subsequent development projects. At 'Sony', there is...

Many organizations have embraced intranets with the intent to harness the technology to support knowledge management initiatives. Despite the promise that intranet technology holds in this regard, many of the early research studies indicate rather disappointing results. In this paper we propose a model that organizations can use to conceptualize and reflect on their intranet applications with a view towards more fruitful results, specifically in terms of knowledge creation. We do so by drawing upon Nonaka's well-known framework of knowledge creation and combining that with a taxonomy of five intranet use modes. For each of Nonaka's four knowledge creating activities we associate and describe the corresponding primary intranet use mode that we argue can foster the knowledge creation process. We illustrate the arguments with findings from our own empirical intranet field studies and other documented intranet-related knowledge management research. We conclude with some implications of the model and we suggest avenues for further research.

Negotiation is a decentralized decision-making process that seeks to find an agreement which will satisfy the requirements of two or more parties in the presence of limited common knowledge and conflicting preferences. Negotiation participants are agents who negotiate on their own behalf or represent the interests of their principals. When electronic negotiations enter the stage, these agents could be intelligent software entities that take part in the process of searching for an acceptable agreement. The degree of involvement of these “intelligent agents ” in negotiations can range from supporting human negotiators (e.g. information search, offer evaluation) to fully automating the conduct of negotiations. Choosing the degree of involvement depends upon the characteristics of the problem in the negotiation. In this chapter, we review electronic negotiation systems and intelligent agents for negotiations. Different types of negotiation agents, their roles and requirements, and various methods for effective support or conduct of negotiations are discussed. Selected applications of intelligent negotiation agents are presented.

An important characteristic of the mobile agents is their ability to hop autonomously from one machine to another in order to perform their tasks more efficiently. One design approach of the agent mobility facility is to equip the agents with an itinerary that specifies in a declarative fashion the navigation plan of the agent thus separating the navigation from the computation. Existing systems following this approach fail to support the dynamic modification and customisation of the agent's itinerary plan. These characteristics are important because the agents should be capable of altering their migration plans depending on run-time conditions and information such as the current availability of services and level of network traffic. In this paper the architecture and functionality of an agent navigator, designed to alleviate the aforementioned problems, is presented. It is shown that the navigator can be embedded in every agent as an onboard facility and offers an interface via which the current active parts of its plan can modify the plan itself at run-time. Furthermore it is shown that the navigator's contents can be used as re-usable components that can be copied to other agents thus allowing agents to share navigational knowledge.

Many organisations have embraced intranets with the intent of harnessing the technology to support knowledge management initiatives. Despite the promise that intranet technology holds in this regard, many of the early research studies indicate rather disappointing results. In this paper we propose a model that organisations can use to conceptualise and reflect on their intranet applications with a view towards more fruitful results, specifically in terms of knowledge creation. We do so by drawing upon Nonaka's well-known framework of knowledge creation and combining that with a taxonomy of five intranet use modes. For each of Nonaka's four knowledge creating activities we associate and describe the corresponding primary intranet use mode that we argue can foster the knowledge creation process. We illustrate the arguments with findings from our own empirical intranet field studies and other documented intranet-related knowledge management research. We conclude with some implications of the model and we suggest avenues for further research.

Version 0.91

This paper presents a discussion of technology issues considered in a Working Group of the Object Management Group The contents of this paper are presented to create discussion in the computer industry on this topic; the contents of this paper are not to be considered an adopted Agent Technology, Green Paper Version 0.9 OMG Document ec/99-12-02 Page 2 of 64