Agents, which are more or less autonomous programs performing tasks on behalf of users, act by exchange of messages. The content of messages is regulated by agreements called ontologies among the interoperating parties. In order for interoperation involving complex objects to be successful,...

The focus of this paper is on quality of ontologies as they relate to interoperating information systems. Quality is not a property of something but a judgment, so must be relative to some purpose, and generally involves recognition of design tradeoffs. Ontologies used for information systems...

This paper argues that a community of interoperating information systems agents requires an ontology not only of the objects in the world, the agents themselves and the message types available; but also of the complex behavioural protocols through which tasks are accomplished. The universe of...

This paper shows how it is possible to represent the complex data structures needed to support electronic commerce applications in the semantic web using ontologies. The conventional mereological or subtype-oriented refinement of the ontology is supplemented by a method of coordinated refinement...

Information systems ontology is intended to facilitate interoperability among the many applications which are now becoming available on the Internet. In particular, it is intended to facilitate the development of intelligent agents which can automate a large part of the task of a user achieving...

This paper investigates the situations where there are incentives for people to pay a premium over the channel costs for information content. It concludes that there are at least four: premium low relative to channel costs and monopoly, which are less interesting as they are not specific to...