ELSEVIER Data & Knowledge Engineering 23 (1997) 215-216

ENGINEERING

Guest editorial

Distributed expertise

Knowledge management is one of the key factors in the increasing competition in the worldwide market. Easy access to knowledge reduces the time to market for products and improves the product quality. Within organizations knowledge is typically distributed between several experts and departments being located all over the world.

The acquisition, modelling and management of distributed expertise was the main focus of the 2nd Knowledge Engineering Forum held in Karlsruhe in Spring 1996. During the Forum it became apparent that various research topics are being discussed in this context. This special issue contains a selection of papers which have been presented at the Forum and have been extended and refined for this special issue of the Data and Knowledge Engineering Journal. We aimed at choosing papers representing several different research directions.

JiJrgen Miiller gives an overview on multi-agents systems which are one prominent approach for implementing systems which are highly flexible and adaptive to changing environments. He stresses the need for an engineering methodology which supports the development of agent-based systems and describes the initial steps towards it.

The paper co-authored by Matthias Jarke, Manfred Jeusfeld, Peter Peters and Klaus Pohl describes a flexible approach for the cooperative creation, evaluation, and evolution of distributed organizational knowledge. They present three strategies: cooperative conceptual modeling, multi-simulation, and explicit process support. They propose to use a meta-level modelling framework enabling the customizing of the modelling language which is used by the cooperating domain experts.

The approach of Barbara Dellen, Frank Maurer and Gerhard Pews integrates knowledge-based techniques with workflow management approaches to support complex work processes. The resulting framework increases the flexibility of workflow management by allowing to alternate between project planning and project execution. Special emphasis is put on supporting the change management within such a highly flexible environment.

An approach for the integration and aggregation of vague, uncertain, and partially inconsistent knowledge, being acquired from different experts, is described in the paper by Barbara Messing. She presents a framework based on many-valued logic which allows to formally represent, process and combine these kinds of knowledge. The approach exploits the notion of bilattices for organizing truth value spaces in a flexible way and introduces global operators for integrating divergent knowledge.

These papers show several directions of ongoing developments in the area of distributed expertise. However, not everything is covered: topics like distributed problem-solving or sharing and reuse of ontologies are beyond the scope of this special issue. We thank all the authors for their effort to provide high-quality contributions. Last but not least, we

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216 Guest Editorial / Data & Knowledge Engineering 23 (1997) 215-216

want to thank all rev iewers for their t ho rough rev iews and for p rov id ing their expert ise for improv ing

the papers o f this special issue.

Frank Maurer University of Kaiserslautern, P.O. 3049, D-67653 Kaiserslautern

e-mail: maurer@ informatik.uni-kl.de

Rudi Studer Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, D-76128 Karlsruhe e-mail: studer @ aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de

Rudi Studer obtained a Diploma in Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart in 1975. In 1982 he was awarded a Doctor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science (Dr. rer. nat.) at the University of Stuttgart, and in 1985 he obtained his Habilitation in Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart. From January 1977 to June 1985 he worked as a research scientist at the University of Stuttgart. From July 1985 to October 1989 he was project leader and manager at the Scientific Center of IBM Germany. Since November 1989 he is Full Professor in Applied Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe. His research interests include knowledge engineering, formal specification languages, knowledge discovery in databases, and knowledge management.