A DAI Perspective on Cooperating Knowledge-Based Systems

Business operations, including sales, marketing, manufacturing, and design, can no longer be done in isolation, but must be done in a global context, i.e., as part of an enterprise. A characteristic of such enterprises is that their information systems are large and complex, and the information is in a variety of forms, locations, and computers. The information systems can be large in several senses: (1) they can be geographically distributed, (2) they can have many components, (3) they can have a huge content, both in the number of concepts and in the amount of data about each concept, and (4) they can have a broad scope, i.e., coverage of a major portion of a significant domain. Also, the components of the systems are typically distributed and heterogeneous. The topology of these systems is dynamic and their content is changing so rapidly that it is difficult for a user or an application program to obtain correct information, or for the enterprise to maintain consistent information.