Markus Hannebauer - Böcker

The 20 revised full papers presented in this book together with 4 section surveys were carefully reviewed and selected from the papers contributed to the 14th International Conference on Applications of Prolog, INAP 2001, held in Tokyo, Japan, in October 2002.The papers are devoted to the four tightly interwoven aspects knowledge acquisition, knowledge management, knowledge processing, and knowledge distribution, all in the context of the World Wide Web; they are organized in topical sections on Web languages and logic, knowlege acquisition and knowledge representation, decision support by advanced logic programming, and Web-knowledge management and data mining. The book is targeted to designers and users of e-business systems and e-government systems, for IT professionals who build such systems, as well as for the wider audience interested in the technical background of knowledge processing for the Web.

The present volume of Springer's \Lecture Notes in Arti cial Intelligence" - cuses on the challenge of balancing between the two extremes of pure reactivity and in-depth social deliberation in the context of multi-agent systems. Finding a balance between these two extremes will lead to an overall behavior of the individual agents and of the multi-agent system that meets the demands of the environment but also the demand for high-quality problem solving results. This book collects selected and revised papers from \Balancing Reactivity and Social Deliberation in Multi-Agent Systems"{aworkshop held at the 14th European Conference on Arti cial Intelligence (ECAI 2000) { and additional papers from renowned researchers in the eld. All the papers contained in this book have undergone at least one complete phase of reviewing and correction with ty- cally three reviews, the large majority of them have been through two phases. In the rst phase, papers were reviewed by members of the advisory committee, in the second phase, papers were peer-reviewed among the authors with additional comments from members of the advisory committee.Although several contributions to this book stem from members of the - boCup community and as such also deal with related topics, this is not a book on RoboCup.

High communication efforts and poor problem solving results due to restricted overview are two central issues in collaborative problem solving. This work addresses these issues by introducing the processes of agent melting and agent splitting that enable individual problem solving agents to continually and autonomously reconfigure and adapt themselves to the particular problem to be solved. The author provides a sound theoretical foundation of collaborative problem solving itself and introduces various new design concepts and techniques to improve its quality and efficiency, such as the multi-phase agreement finding protocol for external problem solving, the composable belief-desire-intention agent architecture, and the distribution-aware constraint specification architecture for internal problem solving.The practical relevance and applicability of the concepts and techniques provided are demonstrated by using medical appointment scheduling as a case study.