this paper we describe the constructs and fundamental concepts of a rule-based method for modeling business processes and the specification of workflows. In chapter 2 we discuss the meaning, notation and origin of business rules and their suitability for modeling of business processes. The third chapter shows how different types of control flows can be described by business rules. The fourth chapter deals with some extensions to the business rule approach, particularly with constructs for representing a data model and an organizational model. The refinement process is described in chapter 5. 2 Business Rules 2.1 Definition

ABSTRACT Whereas temporal interval algebras appear to be the class of formalisms from Artificial Intelligence that is currently privileged by such researchers who are trying to handle temporal information as found in legal documents, there does not appear to be a consensus, within AI for Law, about a structured way of integrating the representation of the temporal data into the broader picture of treating the events or the overall plot. We describe here a knowledge representation formalism well-suited to take into account the temporal characteristics of narratives (of narrative documents). In these documents, the main part of the information content consists in the description of ‘events ’ that relate the real or intended behaviour of some ‘actors ’ (characters, personages, etc.). Narrative documents of an industrial and economic interest correspond, for example, to news stories, corporate documents (memos, policy statements, reports and minutes), normative and legal texts, intelligence messages, representation of the patient's medical records, etc. The formalism we present here is characterised by the following main properties: (i) it provides some general tools to deal with the ‘fuzziness ’ which, in concrete situations, is inherently associated with the representation of any sort of ‘timestamp’; (ii) it offers a way of implementing an efficient temporal reasoner, able to deal, for example, with the purely mechanical aspects of the well-known problem concerning the ‘persistence of a situation’; (iii) it makes use of some second order representation tools (binding structures) to replace, to a certain extent, the interval algebra tools in the Allen style.

The CONCERTO project is concerned with the creation and management of knowledge repositories. The distinctive approach is to maintain an association between the textual form in which knowledge is expressed in source documents, and an expressive narrative knowledge representation language that supports inference and query operations. We first situate the CONCERTO approach in relation to current principles of knowledge management, before exploring three aspects of the mechanisms that CONCERTO supports: document management, acquisition of knowledge from text, and annotation base management. The concluding section gives an insight into how these mechanisms are being translated into changing working practices in a knowledge-based organisation within the CONCERTO consortium. 1 Principles of Knowledge Management In recent years, knowledge management has come to prominence as a topic of major concern for organisations (Davenport & Prusak, 1998). However, it is only very recently that academic discussion has moved towards practical implementation on the large scale,

this paper, we propose to associate with the WWW objects not the nal conceptual

Abstract not found

The KnowMore project aims at providing active support to humans working on knowledge-intensive tasks. To this end the knowledge available in the modeled business processes or their incarnations in specific workows shall be used to improve information handling. We present a representation formalism for knowledge-intensive tasks and the specification of its object-oriented realization. An operational semantics is sketched by specifying the basic functionality of the Knowledge Agent which works on the knowledge intensive task representation. The Knowledge Agent uses a meta-level description of all information sources available in the Organizational Memory. We discuss the main dimensions that such a description scheme must be designed along, namely information content, structure, and context. On top of relational database management systems, we basically realize deductive object-oriented modeling with a comfortable annotation facility. The concrete knowledge descriptions are obtained by co...

. In this paper, we introduce some of the data structures proper to NKRL (Narrative Knowledge Representation Language), a language expressly designed for representing, in a standardised way (metadata), the semantic content (the `meaning') of complex multimedia documents. We will emphasise, in particular, some characteristics of the new version of NKRL, implemented in Java and XML/RDF compliant. RDF (Resource Description Format) is a proposal for defining and processing World Wide Web metadata that is developed by a specific W3C Working Group (W3C = World Wide Web Consortium). 1