Extending Loosely Coupled Federated Information Systems Using Agent Technology

Different FIPA-compliant agent development platforms are available for developing multiagent systems. FIPA compliance ensures interoperability among agents across different platforms. Although most agent implementation platforms provide some form of white- and yellow-page functionalities to advertise and identify agent roles and descriptions, there are no clear architectural standards that define how an agent community can effortlessly adapt to operate in a federated information system (FIS) where new content sources are constantly added or changes are made to existing content sources. This chapter presents a framework based on the semantic Web vision to address extensibility in a loosely coupled FIS.

Chief Knowledge Officers

Knowledge management (KM) refers to a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness, and learning across the organization. KM typically takes the form of programs that are tied to organizational objectives and are intended to lead to the achievement of specific outcomes such as shared intelligence, improved performance, competitive advantage, or higher levels of innovation. Knowledge management focuses on developing and maintaining intellectual capital across the organization. It attempts to bring under one set of practices various strands of thought and practice relating to: • Harnessing the effective use of data, information, and know-how in a knowledge-based organization and economy • The idea of the learning organization • Various enabling organizational practices such as communities of practice and corporate yellow page directories for accessing key personnel and expertise • Various enabling technologies such as knowledge bases and expert systems, help desks, corporate intranets and extranets, and content management systems (Wikipedia, 2007). Beginning in the 1990s, the person responsible for directing and coordinating these activities for organizations was oftentimes designated the chief knowledge office (CKO).