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Investigates the differences in protocols between arbitral tribunals and courts, with particular emphasis on US, Greek and English law. Gives examples of each country and its way of using the law in specific circumstances, and shows the variations therein. Sums up that arbitration is much the better way to gok as it avoids delays and expenses, plus the vexation/frustration of normal litigation. Concludes that the US and Greek constitutions and common law tradition in England appear to allow involved parties to choose their own judge, who can thus be an arbitrator. Discusses e‐commerce and speculates on this for the future.

One key issue of maintaining Web information systems is to guarantee the consistency of their knowledge base, in particular, the rules governing them. There are currently few methods that can ensure that rule bases management can scale to the amount of knowledge in these systems environment.

In this paper, the authors propose a method to detect correct dependencies between rules. This work represents a preliminary step for a proposal to eliminate rule base anomalies. The authors previously developed a method that aimed to ameliorate the extraction of rules dependency relationships using a new technique. In this paper, they extend the proposal with other techniques to increase the number of extracted rules dependency relationships. The authors also add some modules to filter and represent them.

The authors evaluated their own method against other semantic methods. The results show that this work succeeded in extracting better numbers of correct rules dependency relationships. They also noticed that the rule groups deduced from this method’s results are very close to those provided by the rule bases developers.

This work can be applied to knowledge bases that include a fact base and a rule base. In addition, it is independent of the field of application.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

Ubiquitous web applications (UWA) are a new type of web applications which are accessed in various contexts, i.e. through different devices, by users with various interests, at anytime from anyplace around the globe. For such full‐fledged, complex software systems, a methodologically sound engineering approach in terms of model‐driven engineering (MDE) is crucial. Several modeling approaches have already been proposed that capture the ubiquitous nature of web applications, each of them having different origins, pursuing different goals and providing a pantheon of concepts. This paper aims to give an in‐depth comparison of seven modeling approaches supporting the development of UWAs.

This methodology is conducted by applying a detailed set of evaluation criteria and by demonstrating its applicability on basis of an exemplary tourism web application. In particular, five commonly found ubiquitous scenarios are investigated, thus providing initial insight into the modeling concepts of each approach as well as to facilitate their comparability.

The results gained indicate that many modeling approaches lack a proper MDE foundation in terms of meta‐models and tool support. The proposed modeling mechanisms for ubiquity are often limited, since they neither cover all relevant context factors in an explicit, self‐contained, and extensible way, nor allow for a wide spectrum of extensible adaptation operations. The provided modeling concepts frequently do not allow dealing with all different parts of a web application in terms of its content, hypertext, and presentation levels as well as their structural and behavioral features. Finally, current modeling approaches do not reflect the crosscutting nature of ubiquity but rather intermingle context and adaptation issues with the core parts of a web application, thus hampering maintainability and extensibility.

Different from other surveys in the area of modeling web applications, this paper specifically considers modeling concepts for their ubiquitous nature, together with an investigation of available support for MDD in a comprehensive way, using a well‐defined as well as fine‐grained catalogue of more than 30 evaluation criteria.

A wearable expert system (WES) is an expert system designed and implemented to obtain input from and give outputs to wearable devices. Among its distinguishing features are the direct cooperation between domain experts and users, and the interaction with a knowledge maintenance system devoted to dynamically update the knowledge base taking care of the evolving scenario. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The WES development method is based on the Knowledge Acquisition Framework based on Knowledge Artifact (KAFKA) framework. KAFKA employs multiple knowledge artifacts, each devoted to the acquisition and management of a specific kind of knowledge. The KAFKA framework is introduced from both the conceptual and computational points of view. An example is given which demonstrates the interaction, within this framework, of taxonomies, Bayesian networks and rule-based systems. An experimental assessment of the framework usability is also given.

The most interesting characteristic of WESs is their capability to evolve over time, due both to the measurement of new values for input variables and to the detection of new input events, that can be used to modify, extend and maintain knowledge bases and to represent domains characterized by variability over time.

WES is a new and challenging concept, dealing with the possibility for a user to develop his/her own decision support systems and update them according to new events when they arise from the environment. The system fully supports domain experts and users with no particular skills in knowledge engineering methodologies, to create, maintain and exploit their expert systems, everywhere and when necessary.

Expert systems are being effectively applied to a variety of engineering problems. A growing number of languages and development tools are available for their building. Expert systems building tools (shells) are not so flexible as the high‐level languages, but they are easier to use. The problem is that there are too many development tools on the market today, no standards for their evaluation are available, so it is quite difficult to choose the ‘best’ tool for the developer's/user's needs. This paper is an attempt to review the situation on the confused market. Eighty‐six development tools are described in a table form for easy comparisons. Tools implemented on the AI machines only are not included in this survey.

Presents an updated version of a paper given by the author at an international conference in Athens 2000. Briefly outlines the development of the internet and e‐commerce and the effect of globalization. Considers the potential for the EU to standardize rules and advance its economic integration agenda. Looks at present EU laws in this area. Covers the unicitral model law on electronic commerce, its merits and its problems. Discusses personal jurisdiction under traditional rules and cyberspace transactions. Concludes that existing legislation must be re‐evaluated in the light of technological advances, the need for a more mobile kind of legal person and the worldwide nature of transactions across territorial boundaries, paperless contracts and digital signatures and the use of self‐regulation are also covered.

The accurate specification of user’s real requirements from manufacturing planning and control (MPC) systems is carried out very poorly throughout the industry. This paper describes a rule‐based system for the specification of MPC system activities. The rule‐base provides detailed recommendations on the suitability of system activities to individual companies based on company characteristics and management concerns. It also provides supporting reasons for the recommendations. This paper describes the development of the rule‐base from the initial conceptual framework to the fully tested and validated PC‐based application. The rule‐base has been fully tested and validated in ten small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) engaged in batch manufacturing. This paper describes the experiences of two of these case studies by way of example.

A major challenge facing management in developed countries is improving the performance of knowledge and service workers, i.e. the decision and policy makers. In a developing country such as South Africa, with a well‐developed business sector, this need, especially in government, is even more crucial. South Africa has to face many new challenges in the 21st century ‐ growing environmental concerns, massive social and economic inequalities, high occurrences of HIV, low productivity, massive unemployment and the nation’s evolving role in Africa, amongst others. The importance of a sound science and technology policy framework to address these pressing issues cannot be overemphasised This paper discusses the construction of a knowledge‐base from a data repository concerning a South African National Research and Technology (NRT) Audit. This knowledge‐base is to be used as an aid when developing a science and technology policy framework for South Africa. The knowledge‐base is constructed using the cooperative inductive learning team (CILT) approach, which combines diverse data mining tools and human expertise into a cooperative learning system. In this approach, each data mining tool constructs a model of the knowledge as contained in the data repository, thus providing an automated tool to make sense of the knowledge embedded therein. That is, the data mining tools learn from the data in order to obtain new insights. The system also incorporates human domain expertise through the computational modelling of the human subject knowledge. The knowledge, as obtained during team learning, is stored in a team knowledge‐base. Results indicate that the CILT learning team approach can be successfully used to make sense of the vast amounts of data collected and provide a knowledge repository for further decision making and policy formulation.