"When explaining a command, or language feature, or hardware widget, first describe the problem it is designed to solve." -- David Martin

Latest News Items

These machines really seem to care -- An article from the Ottawa Citizen describes how "software would let devices 'sympathize,' understand, nag if they must" (6/10)

22nd FIPA meeting in Sendai Japan -- 22nd FIPA meeting in Sendai, Japan,, July 2001 -- The 22nd meeting of the FIPA standards group will be held in Sendai, Japan from 23-27 July, 2001 at the kind invitation of Communication Technologies. The quarterly FIPA meetings are free and open to FIPA members and interested non-members who are willing to actively contribute to the FIPA process. More information on how to participate in FIPA can be found at http://fipa.org/. (6/10)

When swarm intelligence beats brainpower -- An article on how agent-based ideas are being applied in the financial industry. (6/9)

New Worm Takes On Kiddie Porn -- In what looks like a new twist on virus software a new worm searches for specific content files on the victim's computer in pursuit of a social agenda. The worm searches for files which contain child porn - it finds them by matching image file names. When it finds such files the worm sends off email to government agencies before spreading itself far and wide. As far as we can tell this is the first instance of a virus which targets specific socially unacceptable content, as opposed to pursuing the usual technical disruption agenda of most viruses. (6/8)

Latest Directory Additions

Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology -- Natalya Fridman Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness. Ontologies have become core components of many large applications yet the training material has not kept pace with the growing interest. This paper addresses the issues of why one would build an ontology and presents a methodology for creating ontologies based on declarative knowledge representation systems. It leverages the two authors experiences building and maintaining ontologies in a number of ontology environments including Protege-2000, Ontolingua, and Chimaera. It presents the methodology by example utilizing a tutorial wines knowledge base example. While it is aimed at users of frame-based systems, it can be useful for building ontologies in any object-centered system. (6/9)

Minsky at Game Developers 2001 -- Marvin Minsky gave an invited talk at the 2001 Game Developers Conference. This site has the transcript, audio, video and slides. (6/9)

Information Extraction from the Web -- A report by Line Eikvil gives an introduction to the field of information extraction, looks at wrapper generation for Web sources and examines different applications of the technology. (6/8)

Extracting Knowledge -- Artificial intelligence tools offer new ways to explore Web content. by Katherine C. Adams. (6/8)

Word wranglers -- An article by Katherine C. Adams describes how "Automatic classification tools transform enterprise documents from "bags of words" into knowledge resources" (6/8)

Eye on the Competition -- An article by Dan Sullivan on "why text mining is the key enabler of automated competitive intelligence". (6/8)

Incentives for Sharing in P2P Networks -- An article by Golle, Leyton-Brown and Mironov discusses the incentive issues that arise in P2P systems, such as the free-rider problem in Napster in which individual users are provided with no incentive for sharing their own files and thereby adding value to the network. They present a formal game theoretic model of a P2P system and analyze equilibria of user strategies under several novel payment mechanisms and present experimental results from a multi-agent reinforcement learning model. (6/8)

BPMI.org, The Business Process Management Initiative -- BPMI is a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote and develop the use of Business Process Management (BPM) through the establishment of standards for process design, deployment, execution, maintenance, and optimization. Their main effort is to develop the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) as a meta-language for the modeling of business processes, just as XML is a meta-language for the modeling of business data. BPML provides an abstracted execution model for collaborative and transactional business processes based on the concept of a transactional finite-state machine. (6/8)

The Semantic Web -- will it work? -- An article by David Hitchcock of El.pub offers his opinions on the SW. "Although the semantic web is a current high profile notion and is generating much discussion we are at a very early stage in defining the concepts needed and realizable systems that will add value. The article has been written to stimulate debate on a number of controversial issues surrounding the development of the semantic web. These are based on how the semantic web is being defined by the wide range of "interested parties", and whether the whether the principles and solutions being promoted by such pressure groups are truly innovative or simply a rehash of old concepts which have proved impossible to implement in the past." (6/8)

DAML-S Service Description Ontology -- DAML-S is a DAML-based Web service ontology, which supplies Web service providers with a core set of markup language constructs for describing the properties and capabilities of their Web services in unambiguous, computer-intepretable form. DAML-S markup of Web services will facilitate the automation of Web service tasks including automated Web service discovery, execution, composition and interoperation. Following the layered approach to markup language development, the current version of DAML-S builds on top of DAML+OIL (March 2001), and subsequent versions will likely build on top of DAML-L. (6/4)

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