16 1094-7167/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMSPublished by the IEEE Computer Society

G u e s t E d i t o r s ’ I n t r o d u c t i o n

IFIP Conference onIntelligent InformationProcessingMark A. Musen, Standford University

Bernd Neumann, University of Hamburg

Rudi Studer, University of Karlsruhe

science-related organizations. IFIP, as an “organiza-tion of organizations,” helps disseminate informationtechnology knowledge internationally, in both thedeveloped and developing world. Through its techni-cal committees and associated working groups, IFIPfosters research in all areas of computer science. Everyother year, it organizes the World Computer Congress,which is the oldest and best-known international con-ference featuring the entire spectrum of work in infor-mation processing. At a time when computer scienceis becoming increasingly specialized, IFIP is unusualin its attempt to address and bring together broad areasof interest within a diverse, international community.

The most recent IFIP World Computer Congresswas held in Montreal in August 2002. Within WCC2002 was a conference on intelligent information pro-cessing. IIP 2002 was organized by IFIP WorkingGroup 12.5—dedicated to “knowledge-oriented devel-opment of applications”—of Technical Committee 12on artificial intelligence. The group was founded tobring together an international community of scien-tists concerned with using knowledge-based tech-niques in real-world software system engineering.

IIP 2002 emphasized discussions of knowledge-based system architectures and intelligent informationmanagement. Invited talks and panels highlightedimportant new topics, such as the use of ontologies to

The International Federation for Information Processing is an umbrella organiza-

tion for national societies working in this field. IFIP was established under the

auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in

1960. It continues to maintain close ties to the UN and to nongovernmental computer-

support knowledge-based applications, theemergence of knowledge-based techniques onthe Web, agent-oriented architectures, and fun-damental questions of knowledge representa-tion. The complete Proceedings of IIP 2002are available as a bound volume from Kluwer.

This special issue of IEEE Intelligent Sys-tems presents expanded versions of the fourpapers that received the highest ratings fromthe IIP 2002 scientific program committee.To prepare for this issue, we also askedauthors to respond to an additional round ofpeer review. The articles provide a perspec-tive on what was an extremely stimulating“meeting within a meeting” that emphasizedresearch on pragmatic aspects of AI.

Interestingly, despite the considerable het-erogeneity of the World Computer Congress,the four articles share common themes and acommon world view. Each article emphasizesin a different way the importance of repre-senting domain knowledge using explicitontologies. Each submission almost takes forgranted the core notion of defining preciseconcepts and relationships among conceptsas the central element in building intelligentapplication systems. A theme in these arti-cles—which was echoed throughout the con-ference—is that domain knowledge must beavailable online; the next generation ofknowledge-system architectures must be ableto accommodate distributed knowledgebases, distributed problem solvers, and theheterogeneity in both representational choicesand ontological distinctions that is inevitablewith the expanding World Wide Web.

In “Identifying Communities of Practicethrough Ontology Network Analysis,” HarithAlani, Srinandan Dasmahapatra, KieronO’Hara, and Nigel Shadbolt describe a toolcalled Ontocopi. Ontocopi incorporates analgorithm for ontology-based network analy-sis to extract relationships among entitiesthat—in the case of the particular ontologiesstudied—can identify communities of prac-tice (informal groups of individuals whointeract, sharing common work practices andinterests). The article defines a formal, ontol-ogy-based algorithm for a task that is tradi-tionally performed through relatively infor-mal ethnographic analysis.

Alexander Maedche, Boris Motik, LjiljanaStojanovic, Rudi Studer, and Raphael Volzconcentrate on ontology management issuesin “Ontologies for Enterprise KnowledgeManagement.” They present an architecturefor managing ontology evolution, which willbe an essential feature of the next generation

of ontology development tools. The Seman-tic Web promises to strain our ability to dealwith problems of ontology change and ontol-ogy mapping; the authors’Ontologging sys-tem offers a step toward addressing these sig-nificant challenges.

“Configuring Online Problem-SolvingResources with the Internet Reasoning Ser-vice,” by Monica Crubézy, Enrico Motta,Wenjin Lu, and Mark A. Musen, concentrateson issues of problem solving. The article dis-cusses how the Web can provide a vehicle forexecuting reusable problem-solving meth-ods and how such methods can implementvarious Web services. The use of reusableproblem-solving methods has been an impor-tant aspect of work on knowledge-based sys-tems for more than a decade. The InternetReasoning Service this article describes nowlets such reusable problem solvers interop-erate in cyberspace.

“Using JessTab to Integrate Protégé andJess,” by Henrik Eriksson, was one of theexcellent applications papers presented at theconference. Eriksson describes the integra-tion of support for the popular Jess rule-basedsystem shell with the Protégé-2000 ontologyand knowledge base development environ-ment. The article describes the challenges ofcombining the two systems. It also presentsa framework for building intelligent systemsthat hundreds of users now employ regularlyfor a wide range of application areas.

In general, IIP 2002 discussions empha-sized rapidly evolving topics such as theimportance of ontology design and manage-ment in constructing intelligent systems, thepromise of the Semantic Web and the role ofAI in supporting distributed intelligence overthe Internet, and the opportunity for machinelearning and information extraction that theburgeoning amount of Web content offers.There was a tremendous sense at the confer-ence that the advent of the Web is doingmuch to change AI practice and the future ofintelligent systems. Uniform excitementexisted about the new directions in whichpragmatic work in AI is headed as the Webcreates new content and new infrastructureon which to build the next generation of intel-ligent application systems.

As the conference and program cochairsof IIP 2002, we are delighted to share

this sampling of the conference with the read-ership of IEEE Intelligent Systems.

MARCH/APRIL 2003 computer.org/intelligent 17

T h e A u t h o r sMark A. Musen is aprofessor of medicine(medical informatics)and computer science atStanford University andis head of the StanfordMedical Informatics lab-oratory. His researchinterests include knowl-

edge acquisition for intelligent systems, knowl-edge system architecture, and medical decisionsupport. He has directed the Protégé project sinceits inception in 1986, emphasizing the use ofexplicit ontologies and reusable problem-solvingmethods to build robust knowledge-based systems.He has an MD from Brown University and a PhDfrom Stanford. Contact him at Stanford MedicalInformatics, 251 Campus Dr., Stanford Univ.,Stanford, CA 94305; musen@smi.stanford.edu;www.smi.stanford.edu/people/musen.

Bernd Neumann is afull professor in infor-matics, head of the Arti-ficial Intelligence Lab-oratory, and chair of theHamburg InformaticsTechnology Center atHamburg University’sDepartment for Infor-

matics. His research interests include imageunderstanding, knowledge management, andknowledge-based systems for diagnosis and con-figuration. He received his diploma in electricalengineering from the Technical University ofDarmstadt, and his SM and PhD from MIT. He ischair of IFIP’s Technical Committee on ArtificialIntelligence, a member of the AAAI, the ACM,the IEEE, and the German informatics society(GI). Contact him at neumann@informatik.uni-hamburg.de.

Rudi Studer is a fullprofessor in appliedinformatics at the Uni-versity of Karlsruhe’sInstitute of AppliedInformatics and FormalDescription Methods),the director of theKnowledge Manage-

ment Group at the FZI (Research Center for Infor-mation Technologies), University of Karlsruhe,and a member of the L3S Learning Lab in Han-nover, Germany. His research interests includeknowledge management, Semantic Web tech-nologies and applications, ontology engineering,knowledge discovery, and e-learning. He receivedhis Habilitation in computer science and his PhDin mathematics and computer science, both fromthe University of Stuttgart. He is on the editorialboard of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is a memberof the AAAI,ACM, IEEE, and the German infor-matics society (GI). Contact him at Institute AIFB,Univ. of Karlsruhe, 76128 Karlsruhe, Englerstr.11, 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany; studer@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de; www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS.