An ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents. The concept is important for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. The Handbook on Ontologies provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospectives of the field of ontologies. The handbook demonstrates standards that have been created recently, it surveys methods that have been developed and it shows how to bring both into practice of ontology infrastructures and applications that are the best of their kind.

EBOOK: Information Systems Development

A study of soft computing agents. It seeks to: explore the development of soft computing-based agents; examine the role of soft computing-based technology in facets of agent design; and cross-fertilise ideas on the soft computing perspective to the development of agent-based systems.

Annotation. The Lyee International Workshop (Lyee-W02) is a means for presenting the results of the Lyee International research project, oriented for new software generation techniques based on Lyee technologies. Lyee-W02 will help to build a forum for exchanging ideas and experiences in the field of new directions on software development methodologies and its tools and techniques. Lyee methodology captures the essence of the innovations, controversies, challenges, and possible solutions of the software industry. This theory is born from experience and it is the time to stimulate the academic research on software science initiated from experience to theory through this workshop and its coming series.

This book constitutes the ?rst volume of the ?rst journal in the new LNCS Jo- nalSubline,theJournalonDataSemantics. Publishingajournalinabookseries might come as a surprise to customers, readers, and librarians, thus we would like to provide some background information and our motivation for introducing this new LNCS subline. As a consequence of the very tight interaction between the Lecture Notes in ComputerScienceseriesandtheinternationalcomputerscienceresearchand- velopment community, we receive quite a few proposals for new archive journals. From the successful launch of workshops or conferences and publication of their proceedings in the LNCS series, it might seem like a natural step to approach the publisher about launching a journal once this speci?c ?eld has gained a c- tain level of maturity and stability. Each year we receive about a dozen such proposals and even more informal inquiries. Like other publishers, it has been our experience that launching a new jo- nal and making it a long-term success is a hard job nowadays, due to a generally di?cult market situation, and library budget restrictions in particular. Because many of the proceedings in LNCS, and especially many of the LNCS postp- ceedings, apply the same strict reviewing and selection criteria as established journals, we started discussing with proposers of new journals the alternative of devoting a few volumes in LNCS to their ?eld, instead of going through the painful Sisyphean adventure of establishing a new journal on its own.

Inspired by today's world of increasingly available knowledge and rapidly changing access to it, this book examines the challenges of decision making when knowledge expands faster than we can learn, analyzes how knowledge changes shape depending on who owns it, and reveals how knowledge disappears in its own volatility. Offering a truly comprehensive exploration of the topic, this guide also instructs how to generate, select, measure, manage, network, protect, sell, and respect knowledge.

Completely revised and updated, Evaluation of Human Work is a compendium of ergonomics methods and techniques that is both broad and deep. The editors have once again brought together a team of world-renowned experts and created a forum for them to introduce their most valued techniques and methods. Almost every chapter has been revised and several new chapters have been added. See what’s new in the Third Edition: Sociotechnical design of work systems Team design and evaluation Learning from failures through a joint cognitive systems perspective The Analysis of organizational processes Techniques in user-centered design Increased understanding of the nature of knowledge and knowledge management in contemporary systems Environment surveys Systems for near miss reporting and analysis The one thing that has remained unchanged from the first and second editions is that this text is produced NOT as a cookbook of ergonomics methods. The editor places ergonomics methodology in context, and each chapter carefully describes the background to method development in that area and the application of methods and tools. Exploring the topic of ergonomics/human factors from a ‘doing it’ perspective, the book serves as a guide to what ergonomics can offer industry, business, or human service professionals and a reference for practicing ergonomists.

1. 1 Background In this work, we develop a framework for the design of multi-agent systems inspired by (human) organizational principles. Organizations are complex entities formed to ov- come various limitations of individual agencies, such as cognitive, physical, temporal and institutional limitations. There is a parallel between the complexity of organizations and multi-agent systems. Therefore, we explore the use of concepts, methods and techniques from human organizational design as architectural principles for multi-agent systems. Three research lines are presented: organizational modeling and coordination, interop- ability and agent models. Organizational modeling and coordination are concerned with how resources (i. e. agents) can be identi?ed and related to each other. In order to have agents cooperate, several issues of interoperability have to be addressed. Agent models deal with the design of individual intelligent software agents, taking into account typical features of agent intelligence. Every (human) activity raises two challenges: division of labor and coordi- tion [Mintzberg, 1993]. Division of labor is the decomposition of work (or goals) into various distinct tasks. Coordination refers to managing relations between these tasks to carry out the work. The patterns of division of labor, responsibilities (people who do the work), clustering of responsibilities into units and coordination between units can be de?ned by organizational structures [Galbraith, 1973]. The design of an organization should cover how one or more actors are engaged in one or more tasks, where knowledge, capabilities and resources are distributed.