The Workshop on Intelligent Information Integration (III), organized in conjunction with the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, was held on 31 July 1999 in Stockholm, Sweden. Approximately 40 people participated, and nearly 20 papers were presented. This packed workshop schedule resulted from a large number of submissions that made it difficult to reserve discussion time without rejecting an unproportionately large number of papers. Participants included scientists and practitioners from industry and academia.

Twenty-six people participated, and 16 papers were presented. The first day was devoted to paper presentations and discussions. The second (half) day, a joint session was held with two other workshops: (1) Building, Maintaining, and Using Organizational Memories and (2) Intelligent Information Integration. The reason for the joint session was that in all three workshops, ontologies play a prominent role, and the goal was to bring together researchers working on related issues in different communities.

Now completing its first year, the High-Performance Knowledge Bases Project promotes technology for developing very large, flexible, and reusable knowledge bases. The project is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and includes more than 15 contractors in universities, research laboratories, and companies.

This article is a report of the Eighth Ireland Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS-97), which was run in conjunction with the Irish Machine Vision and Image Processing Conference (IMVIP-97), held at the University of Ulster, Magee College in Derry / Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on 10 to 13 September 1997.

In computational cognitive modeling, we hypothesize internal mental processes of human cognitive activities and express such activities by computer programs. Such computational models often consist of many components and aspects. Claims are often made that certain aspects play a key role in modeling, but such claims are sometimes not well justified or explored. We then discuss, in principle, systematic ways of identifying the source of power in models.

The 1997 AAAI Workshop on AI Approaches to Fraud Detection and Risk Management brought together over 50 researchers and practitioners to discuss problems of fraud detection, computer intrusion detection, and risk scoring. This article presents highlights, including discussions of problematic issues that are common to these application domains, and proposed solutions that apply a variety of AI techniques.

This article describes a one-day workshop entitled AI and Knowledge Management that was held at the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The workshop was successful in identifying areas where AI techniques can be used to help those working on knowledge management and identifying areas for future work in this area.

We have selected 10 specific projects for this study, including general ontologies, domain-specific ones, and one knowledge representation system. The comparison framework includes general characteristics, such as the purpose of an ontology, its coverage (general or domain specific), its size, and the formalism used. Characteristics that describe the content of an ontology include taxonomic organization, types of concept covered, top-level divisions, internal structure of concepts, representation of part-whole relations, and the presence and nature of additional axioms. By identifying the similarities and differences among existing ontologies, we clarify the range of alternatives in creating a standard framework for ontology design.

Search engines are among the most successful applications on the web today. So many search engines have been created that it is difficult for users to know where they are, how to use them, and what topics they best address. Metasearch engines reduce the user burden by dispatching queries to multiple search engines in parallel. The SAVVYSEARCH metasearch engine is designed to efficiently query other search engines by carefully selecting those search engines likely to return useful results and responding to fluctuating load demands on the web.