in current computer technology. Ontologies provide a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people and application systems. Therefore, they may play a major role in supporting information exchange processes in various areas. This book discusses the role ontologies

, functions, and other objects — is called an ontology. This paper describes a mechanism for defining ontologies that are portable over representation systems. Definitions written in a standard format for predicate calculus are translated by a system called Ontolingua into specialized representations

This paper provides an overview of research and development activities in the field of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. It aims to identify key concepts and applications, and to indicate how they relate to one-another. Some historical context to the field of agent-based computing

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Agent-oriented techniques represent an exciting new means of analysing, designing and building complex software systems. They have the potential to significantly improve current practice in software engineering and to extend the range of applications that can feasibly be tackled. Yet, to date

the requirements for Internet host software. This RFC covers the communications protocol layers: link layer, IP layer, and transport layer; its companion RFC-1123 covers the application and support protocols.

While knowledge is viewed by many as an asset, it is often difficult to locate particular items within a large electronic corpus. This paper presents an agent based framework for the location of resources to resolve a specific query, and considers the associated design issue. Aspects of the work

The last few decades have seen a spectacular integration of the global economy through trade. The rising integration of world markets has brought with it a disintegration of the production process, however, as manufacturing or services activities done abroad are combined with those performed

Many AI researchers are today striving to build agent teams for complex, dynamic multi-agent domains, with intended applications in arenas such as education, training, entertainment, information integration, and collective robotics. Unfortunately, uncertainties in these complex, dynamic domains

, such as goals to be achieved, agents to be assigned, alternatives to be negotiated, etc. The paper presents an approach to requirements acquisition which is driven by such higher-level concepts. Requirements models are acquired as instances of a conceptual meta-model. The latter can be represented as a graph