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Intelligent Information Agents for Web Economies
TFG
Intelligent Information Agents for Web Economies
Chairs
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
e-mail: bergamaschi.sonia@unimo.it
official web page: http://www.dbgroup.unimo.it/bergamaschi.html
Matthias Klusch, DFKI Saarbruecken, Germany
official web page: http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/
Profile
The TFG on Intelligent INformation Agent for Web Economies initiative stems from the AgentLinkII SIG on Intelligent
Information Agents (IIA). The SIG main focus was to collect researchers in
the field of information systems and multi-agent systems. More precisely
the TFG proposal stems from the results obtained in the Agent-Based
Information System working group of the SIG on Intelligent Information
Agents. Achievements have been accomplished as far as information access
and integration (the MOMIS/MIKS system, the Xyleme system), mobile
information systems (the MIA system) and web ontologies (MAFRA).
TFG aims at further develop the results obtained during previous work by
IIA. Thanks to the agent abstraction, we can easily view the three
identified fields as converging towards next generation information
systems. The work will thus aim at investigating agent capabilites in this
context to provide more accessible, open and interoperable services. This
implies that results from successful areas pertaining to multi-agent
systems, such as coordination and resource management (Professor Matjaz
Gams, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia has expressed interest in presenting
a load-balancer MAS) must be integrated to advance information
systems.
As far integration system, we will focus on supporting knowledge intensive
processes (like those involving team design of complex artifacts) that
require distributed data integration and processing. Understanding such
systems through the abstraction of agents appears to be one practical
solution. Building on past experiences done during ALII SIG on IIA working
group, the TFG represent an opportunity to take these results towards
industry (Cadence provides the test-bed for this comparison).
As far mobile information systems, new work has been proposed to the
former SIG on IIA group. The TFG will thus include a session dedicated to
new implemented solutions of multi-agent systems which provide users
advanced and/or seemless services. An example is given by the prototype
GenialChief whose new version will be demonstrated at the meeting. Another
research topic in this session focuses on the role of agents in
distributed data mining: The usage of agent technology provides potential
added value to distributed data mining in a large network of heterogeneous
sources, but also raises concerns about data privacy and security, and the
trustworthiness of agents. In particular, it is crucial that such
concerns be addressed in order to fulfill data owners's requirements on
privacy, since privacy plays an essential role in the motivations of most
research on distributed data mining systems.
New partners from emergin countries have proposed to participate,
introducing their research (Professor Matjaz Gams, Jozef Stefan Institute,
Slovenia has expressed interest in presenting EMA, an employment agent).
As far web ontologies, we will focus on the negotiation of
ontology-mapping-based information integration. This is a vivid research
field and one of the key issues in building next generation semantic web
services. Some TFG participants have already had experiences on this and
are keen to share and receive feedback on their ongoing work.
The TFG represent an initiative aiming at glueing together for this
work. The three fields of the TFG are strongly related by the pool towards
information systems that hold two distinctive features: are based on
semantics and their architecture is moulded by the new wave of
distributed, mobile systems.
The TFG is expected to establish new cooperations among research groups in
the related areas mentioned above, but also to strengthen existing
contacts and focus scattered efforts for research on and development of
intelligent information agents. This includes promotion of collaborative
projects and cross fertilisation of ideas between nodes of the AgentLink
Network of Excellence which are active in R\&D of information agents.
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Last updated on 05/01/2002
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