Cooperating Heterogeneous Systems provides an in-depth introduction to the issues and techniques surrounding the integration and control of diverse and independent software components. Organizations increasingly rely upon diverse computer systems to perform a variety of knowledge-based tasks. This presents technical issues of interoperability and integration, as well as philosophical issues of how cooperation and interaction between computational entities is to be realized. Cooperating systems are systems that work together towards a common end. The concepts of cooperation must be realized in technically sound system architectures, having a uniform meta-layer between knowledge sources and the rest of the system. The layer consists of a family of interpreters, one for each knowledge source, and meta-knowledge. A system architecture to integrate and control diverse knowledge sources is presented. The architecture is based on the meta-level properties of the logic programming language Prolog. An implementation of the architecture is described, a Framework for Logic Programming Systems with Distributed Execution (FLiPSiDE). Knowledge-based systems play an important role in any up-to-date arsenal of decision support tools. The tremendous growth of computer communications infrastructure has made distributed computing a viable option, and often a necessity in geographically distributed organizations. It has become clear that to take knowledge-based systems to their next useful level, it is necessary to get independent knowledge-based systems to work together, much as we put together ad hoc work groups in our organizations to tackle complex problems. The book is for scientists and software engineers who have experience in knowledge-based systems and/or logic programming and seek a hands-on introduction to cooperating systems. Researchers investigating autonomous agents, distributed computation, and cooperating systems will find fresh ideas and new perspectives on well-established approaches to control, organization, and cooperation.

An Overview of Multidatabase Systems: Past and Present / Athman Bouguettaya, Boualem Benatallah, Ahmed Elmagarmid / - Local Autonomy and Its Effects on Multidatabase Systems / Ahmed Elmagarmid, Weimin Du, Rafi Ahmed / - Semantic Similarities Between Objects in Multiple Databases / Vipul Kashyap, Amit Sheth / - Resolution of Representational Diversity in Multidatabase Systems / Joachim Hammer, Dennis McLeod / - Schema Integration: Past, Present, and Future / Sudha Ram, V. Ramesh / - Schema and Language Translation / Bogdan Czejdo, Le Gruenwald / - Multidatabase Languages / Paolo Missier, Marek Rusinkiewicz, W. Jin / - Interdependent Database Systems / George Karabatis, Marek Rusinkiewicz, Amit Sheth / - Correctness Criteria and Concurrency Control / Panos K. Chrysanthis, Krithi Ramamritham / - Transaction Management in Multidatabase Systems: Current Technologies and Formalisms / Ken Barker, Ahmed Elmagarmid / - Transaction-Based Recovery / Jari Veijalainen. ...

Today, technologies for engineering and deployment of cooperative information systems have become increasingly critical in the construction of practically all types of large-scale distributed systems. Stimulating forums with different focuses are thus still in need of researchers and professionals from academia and industry to exchange ideas and experience and to establish working relationships. The idea to organize in China an academic event focusing on current topics in the field was born during the IFIP World Computer Congress 2000 that was held in Beijing, China. And here are the proceedings of EDCIS 2002! This volume comprises the technical research papers accepted for presentation at EDCIS 2002. Of the initial 159 paper submissions involving nearly 500 authors from 14 countries of all continents, 45 papers were carefully selected. Every paper was reviewed by at least three members of the program committee, and judged - cording to its technical merit and soundness, originality, significance, presentation quality, and relevance to the conference. The accepted papers cover various s- jects such as workflow technology, coordination technology, advanced trans- tions, groupware systems, semantic web, ontologies, mobile agents, and enterprise modeling, and enterprise application integration.

Planning and improving of production systems and manufacturing processes is a most complex task in engineering. In small and medium sized enterprises (SME's) it is usually carried out by a group of enterprise planners from different departments within a planning project. The main issue of this research is to overcome the logical and technical boundaries between the highly-interrelated modelling experts and their specific modelling tools and partial planning models as well as to efficiently coordinate their distributed, cooperative planning tasks. Therefore, a methodical integration concept as well as a groupware-based cooperation concept was developed. Now it is possible to combine the large number of sophisticated modelling tools, factory simulators as well as GPM tools, and to guarantee a seamless planning process. The conceptual ideas were implemented in a prototypical toolbox to show the technical realization of the flexible concepts for integration and cooperation support. (Back cover).

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Cooperative Information Systems, CIA'99, held in Uppsala, Sweden in July/August 1999. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 46 submissions. Also included are ten invited contributions by leading experts. The volume is divided in sections on information discovery and management on the Internet; information agents on the Internet-prototypes systems and applications; communication and collaboration, mobile information agents; rational information agents for electronic business; service mediation and negotiation; and adaptive personal assistance.

The thesis presents new results on multi-agent formation control, focusing on the distributed stabilization control of rigid formation shapes. It analyzes a range of current research problems such as problems concerning the equilibrium and stability of formation control systems, or the problem of cooperative coordination control when agents have general dynamical models, and discusses practical considerations arising during the implementation of established formation control algorithms. In addition, the thesis presents models of increasing complexity, from single integrator models, to double integrator models, to agents modeled by nonlinear kinematic and dynamic equations, including the familiar unicycle model and nonlinear system equations with drift terms. Presenting the fruits of a close collaboration between several top control groups at leading universities including Yale University, Groningen University, Purdue University and Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), the thesis spans various research areas, including robustness issues in formations, quantization-based coordination, exponential stability in formation systems, and cooperative coordination of networked heterogeneous systems.

Enterprise Interoperability is the ability of an enterprise or organisation to work with other enterprises or organisations without special effort. It is now recognised that interoperability of systems and thus sharing of information is not sufficient to ensure common understanding between enterprises. Knowledge of information meaning and understanding of how is to be used must also be shared if decision makers distributed between those enterprises in the network want to act consistently and efficiently. Industry’s need for Enterprise Interoperability has been one of the significant drivers for research into the Internet of the Future. EI research will embrace and extend contributions from the Internet of Things and the Internet of Services, and will go on to drive the future needs for Internets of People, Processes, and Knowledge.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents - DAI Meets Databases, CIA-97, held in Kiel, Germany, in February 1997. The book opens with 6 invited full papers by internationally leading researchers surveying the state of the art in the area. The 16 revised full research papers presented were carefully selected during a highly competitive round of reviewing. The papers are organized in topical sections on databases and agent technology, agents for database search and knowledge discovery, communication and cooperation among information agents, and agent-based access to heterogeneous information sources.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering, CDVE 2006, held in Mallorca, Spain in September 2006. The book presents 40 revised full papers, carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers cover all current issues in cooperative design, visualization, and engineering, ranging from theoretical and methodological topics to various systems and frameworks to applications in a variety of fields.

These arethe proceedingsof the Fourth InternationalWorkshopon Cooperative Information Agents, held in Boston Massachusetts, USA, July 7-9, 2000. Cooperative information agent research and development focused originally onaccessingmultiple,heterogeneous,anddistributedinformationsources. Ga- ingaccesstothesesystems,throughInternetsearchengines,applicationprogram interfaces, wrappers, and web-based screens has been an important focus of - operative intelligent agents. Research has also focused on the integration of this information into a coherent model that combined data and knowledge from the multiple sources. Finally, this information is disseminated to a wide audience, giving rise to issues such as data quality, information pedigree, source reliability, information security, personal privacy, and information value. Research in - operative information agents has expanded to include agent negotiation, agent communities, agent mobility, as well as agent collaboration for information d- covery in constrained environments. TheinterdisciplinaryCIAworkshopseriesencompassesa widevarietyoft- ics dealing with cooperative information agents. All workshop proceedings have been published by Springer as Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence, Volumes 1202 (1997), 1435 (1998), and 1652 (1999), respectively. This year, the theme of the CIA workshop was ”’The Future of Information Agents in Cyberspace”, a very ?tting topic as the use of agents for information gathering, negotiation, correlation, fusion, and dissemination becomes ever more prevalent. We noted a marked trend in CIA 2000 towards addressing issues related to communities of agents that: (1) negotiate for information resources, (2) build robust ontologies to enhance search capabilities, (3) communicate for planning and problem so- ing, (4) learn and evolve based on their experiences, and (5) assume increasing degrees of autonomy in the control of complex systems.