Jörg Hoffmann - Böcker

Planning is a crucial skill for any autonomous agent, be it a physically embedded agent, such as a robot, or a purely simulated software agent. For this reason, planning, as a central research area of artificial intelligence from its beginnings, has gained even more attention and importance recently.After giving a general introduction to AI planning, the book describes and carefully evaluates the algorithmic techniques used in fast-forward planning systems (FF), demonstrating their excellent performance in many wellknown benchmark domains. In advance, an original and detailed investigation identifies the main patterns of structure which cause the performance of FF, categorizing planning domains in a taxonomy of different classes with respect to their aptitude for being solved by heuristic approaches, such as FF. As shown, the majority of the planning benchmark domains lie in classes which are easy to solve.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2008, held in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, in June 2008. The 51 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks and 25 system description papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 270 submitted papers. The papers are organized in topical sections on agents, application ontologies, applications, formal languages, foundational issues, learning, ontologies and natural language, ontology alignment, query processing, search, semantic Web services, storage and retrieval of semantic Web data, as well as user interfaces and personalization.