Although the notion of conversations has been discussed for some time as a way in which to provide an abstract representation of extended agent message exchange, there is still no consensus established concerning how to use these abstractions effectively. This paper describes a layered approach based on coloured Petri Nets that can be used for modelling complex, concurrent conversations among a...

Since electronic commerce transaction are characterised by their highly communicative character, the Language-Action-perspective proves to be very suitable to provide a deep-structure analysis because it concentrates on the essential aspects of an electronic commerce transaction rather than the form. In this paper, we present a layered pattern definition language, based on various L/A-perspecti...

In this paper, we present a layered agent framework in which the negotiation process is performed at different levels of abstractions. In a real time, multiple-tasking, resource-bounded environment, negotiation is not an isolated process but one that interleaved with agent’s many other activities, such as scheduling, execution, and other negotiations. To make the complexities of negotiation mor...

Human speech understanding works incrementally. We begin to process acoustic input before the speaker's utterance has ended. A system capable of performing sophisticated communication in a natural dialogue or simultaneous interpreting, has to work incrementally, too. The architecture of such a system should be modular, uniform and integrated. We present an architectural framework that suits the...

In various domain specific applications with heterogeneous databases, an ontologydriven approach to data integration relies on the alignment of the concepts of a global ontology that describes the domain, with the concepts of the ontologies that describe the data in the local databases. Once the alignment between the global ontology and each local ontology is established, agreements that encode...

Software engineers create alternative designs for their programs, develop these designs to various degrees, compare their properties, then choose among them. Yet most software environments do not allo.oJ alternative definitions of procedures to exist simultaneously. It is our hypothesis that an explicit representation for alternative designs can substantially improve a programmer's ability to d...

We investigate two types of graph layouts, track layouts and layered path decompositions, and the relations between their associated parameters track-number and layered pathwidth. We use these two types of layouts to characterize leveled planar graphs, the graphs with planar layered drawings with no dummy vertices. It follows from the known NP-completeness of leveled planarity that track-number...

The oxygen evolution reaction is a key reaction in water splitting. The common approach in the development of oxygen evolution catalysts is to search for catalytic materials with new and optimized chemical compositions and structures. Here we report an orthogonal approach to improve the activity of catalysts without alternating their compositions or structures. Specifically, liquid phase exfoli...

The challenge of ontology-driven modelling of information components is well known in both academia and industry. In this paper, we present a novel approach to deal with customisation and abstraction of ontology-based model evolution. As a result of an empirical study, we identify a layered change operator framework based on the granularity, domain-specificity and abstraction of changes. The im...