People

Research activity in 2000

In the course of 2000 the research activity was organized along three themes.

First, the research activity concerned the conceptual framework supporting the design of coordination mechanisms and the improvement of the related prototypes.

In this framework, the main focus was on the integration of the previously designed prototypes. This specific research effort was funded by the national (MURST) project: "Intelligent Agents: Interaction and Knowledge Acquisition". The integration concerned a module supporting the design and use of Coordination Mechanisms (ABACO), a module devoted to the promotion of awareness among cooperative actors (AW-Manager) and finally a module reconciling the different conceptual schemes people use in their work, at the intra-group as well as at the intergroup levels (Reconciler). All modules have been designed using an agent-based approach. This choice makes integration easier, since the communication interfaces are well-defined and naturally made interoperable by means of direct communication or wrapping techniques. The achieved integration makes the Reconciler a component of the ABACO architecture while the AW-Manager is a specialized component of a middleware which takes information from ABACO, transforms it in awareness information and defines the notification policies that better fit the current context of cooperation. In addition, the problem of supporting the distributed modification of the protocols caracterizing ABACO (inter-organizational workflows) was attacked by using observational equivalencies techniques combined with a new way to conceive the hierarchical representation of the distributed protocols themselves.

A second research activity was devoted to the analysis of the role of Classification Schemes in cooperation. To this aim, a first goal was the comparison with similar notions proposed in other disciplines, typically Knowledge Engineering and Representation. Secondly, the attention was on the usage of classification schemes in cooperation through the analysis of several field studies reported in the literature. This investigation helped in clarifying the requirements a technological support should have in order to take into consideration the distributed nature of cooperative work. The latter makes it difficult to propose a centralized control and requires techniques to manage the interaction of distributed classification schemes. This research applies immediately to the problems discussed in the framework of Knowledge Management where classification schemes play a relevant role in the organization and sharing of various types of information.

The third research activity was in the framework of adaptable WEB based systems. Here, the focus was on techniques devoted to the personalization of product selection and presentation in virtual stores. A special focus was on the application domain of financial products in a project funded by SEP-San Paolo-IMI. The prototype previously developed was improved and systematically tested before its delivery to the funding institution.