language: en

-- IBROW3 --An Intelligent Brokering Service for Knowledge-Component Reuse on the World-Wide Web

V. Richard Benjamins 3,4 , Enric Plaza 4 , Enrico Motta 2 , Dieter Fensel 1 , Rudi Studer 1 , Bob Wielinga 3 , Guus Schreiber 3 , Zdenek Zdrahal 2 and Stefan Decker 1
1 University of Karlsruhe,
Institute AIFB, 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany,
{dfe,studer}@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
2 Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University,
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom,
{E.Motta,Z.Zdrahal}@open.ac.uk
3 Dept. of Social Science Informatics (SWI), University of Amsterdam,
Roetersstraat 15, 1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands,
{richard,schreiber,wielinga}@swi.psy.uva.nl
4 Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA), Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC),
Campus UAB, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain,
enric@iiia.csic.es

The World-Wide Web is changing the nature of software development to a distributive plug & play process. This requires a new way of managing software by so-called intelligent software brokers. The aim of the European IBROW3 project is to develop an intelligent brokering service that enables third party knowledge-component reuse through the World-Wide Web. Suppliers provide libraries of knowledge components adhering to some standard, and customers can consult these libraries -- through intelligent brokers -- to configure a knowledge system suited to their needs by selection and adaptation. IBROW3 integrates research on heterogeneous databases, interoperability and web technology with knowledge-system technology and ontologies. The aim is to develop a broker that can handle web requests for classes of knowledge system (e.g. diagnostic systems) by accessing libraries of reusable problem-solving methods on the Web, and selecting, adapting and configuring these methods in accordance with the domain at hand. The aim of this paper is to give a general overview of the project and to presents its main ideas and approach. IBROW3 has started on January 1, 1998 and thus we can only present preliminary results.

1 Introduction