AI agents combining natural language interaction, task planning, and business ontologies can help companies provide better-quality and more costeffective customer service. Our customer-service agents use natural language to interact with customers, enabling customers to state their intentions directly instead of searching for the places on the Web site that may address their concern. We use planning methods to search systematically for the solution to the customer's problem, ensuring that a resolution satisfactory for both the customer and the company is found, if one exists. Our agents converse with customers, guaranteeing that needed information is acquired from customers and that relevant information is provided to them in order for both parties to make the right decision. The net effect is a more frictionless interaction process that improves the customer experience and makes businesses more competitive on the service front.

To build a machine that has "common sense" was once a principal goal in the field of artificial intelligence. But most researchers in recent years have retreated from that ambitious aim. Instead, each developed some special technique that could deal with some class of problem well, but does poorly at almost everything else. We are convinced, however, that no one such method will ever turn out to be "best," and that instead, the powerful AI systems of the future will use a diverse array of resources that, together, will deal with a great range of problems. To build a machine that's resourceful enough to have humanlike common sense, we must develop ways to combine the advantages of multiple methods to represent knowledge, multiple ways to make inferences, and multiple ways to learn. We held a two-day symposium in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, to discuss such a project -- - to develop new architectural schemes that can bridge between different strategies and representations. This article reports on the events and ideas developed at this meeting and subsequent thoughts by the authors on how to make progress.

Later in the school, the focus turned to ontologies, which is where the true power of the semantic web lies. EUROLAN lecturers treated its potential in terms of what the topic of ontology development it might--and might not--bring to us in the future. This year's and how great its impact will really start somewhere, somehow, even if school was organized by the Faculty be. Although it is not yet clear what emerges is a variety of ontological of Computer Science at the A. I. Cuza whether the current vision of the semantic stores from which to choose. University of Iasi, the Research Institute web will indeed reach its expectations, The EUROLAN summer school also for Artificial Intelligence at the there are more and more included a workshop on ontologies Romanian Academy in Bucharest, opinions that it represents a major and information extraction, a student and the Department of Computer technological step that will permanently workshop on applied natural Science at Vassar College.

In numerous distributed environments, including today's World Wide Web, enterprise data management systems, large science projects, and the emerging semantic web, applications will inevitably use the information described by multiple ontologies and schemas. We organized the Workshop on Semantic Integration at the Second International Semantic Web Conference to bring together different communities working on the issues of enabling integration among different resources. The workshop generated a lot of interest and attracted more than 70 participants.

WEBODE is a scalable workbench for ontological engineering that eases the design, development, and management of ontologies and includes middleware services to aid in the integration of ontologies into real-world applications. WEBODE presents a framework to integrate new ontology-based tools and services, where developers only worry about the new logic they want to provide on top of the knowledge stored in their ontologies.

In this article, we discuss the general problems related to the semantic interpretation of WORDNET taxonomy in light of rigorous ontological principles inspired by the philosophical tradition. Then we introduce the DOLCE upper-level ontology, which is inspired by such principles but with a clear orientation toward language and cognition. We report the results of an experimental effort to align WORDNET's upper level with DOLCE. We suggest that such alignment could lead to an "ontologically sweetened" WORDNET, meant to be conceptually more rigorous, cognitively transparent, and efficiently exploitable in several applications.

In this issue, I have collected a fairly broad, although by no means exhaustive, sampling of work in the field of ontology research. To define a field is often quite difficult; it is more a collection of people and ideas than it is a specific technology. To represent our field, I present six articles that cover several of the major thrusts of ontology research from the past decade.

In this article, we discuss some issues that arise when ontologies are used to support corporate application domains such as electronic commerce (ecommerce) and some technical problems in deploying ontologies for real-world use. In particular, we focus on issues of ontology integration and the related problem of semantic mapping, that is, the mapping of ontologies and taxonomies to reference ontologies to preserve semantics. Along the way, we discuss what typically constitutes an ontology architecture. By its very nature, B2B e-commerce must try to interlink buyers and sellers from multiple companies with disparate product-description terminologies and meanings, thus serving as a paradigmatic case for the use of ontologies to support corporate applications.

This article presents the methodology that has been successfully used over the past seven years by an interdisciplinary team to create the International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums (CIDOC) CONCEPTUAL REFERENCE MODEL (CRM), a high-level ontology to enable information integration for cultural heritage data and their correlation with library and archive information. The CIDOC CRM is now in the process to become an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard. This article justifies in detail the methodology and design by functional requirements and gives examples of its contents. The CIDOC CRM analyzes the common conceptualizations behind data and metadata structures to support data transformation, mediation, and merging. It is argued that such ontologies are propertycentric, in contrast to terminological systems, and should be built with different methodologies. It is demonstrated that ontological and epistemological arguments are equally important for an effective design, in particular when dealing with knowledge from the past in any domain. It is assumed that the presented methodology and the upper level of the ontology are applicable in a far wider domain.

WEBODE is a scalable workbench for ontological engineering that eases the design, development, and management of ontologies and includes middleware services to aid in the integration of ontologies into real-world applications. WEBODE presents a framework to integrate new ontology-based tools and services, where developers only worry about the new logic they want to provide on top of the knowledge stored in their ontologies.