An Ontology-based Broker: Making Problem-Solving Method Reuse Work

We present the architecture of an intelligent broker for enabling the use of problem-solving methods via the World Wide Web (WWW). The core component of such a broker is realised by an ontologist and an adapter. Ontologies mediate between domainspecific requirements and knowledge, task-specific problem descriptions and methodspecific terms describing the competence and requirements of the reasoning components. The ontological reasoning for relating the different ontologies is supported by the ontologies. Adapters are necessary to provide domain knowledge and case data to problem-solving methods and to rephrase the output of problem-solving methods into domain-specific terms. Therefore, the ontologist mediates the selection and adaptation process of PSMs whereas the adapter mediates the execution of them.