Information visualisation workshop

Semantic interoperability in agentspace (Stanislaw Ambroszkiewicz, Institute of Computer Science Polish Academy of Sciences)

Since the autonomous software agents are supposed to "live" in the cyberspace, they must be intelligent, that is, they must efficiently realize the goals delegated to them by their human masters. To do so they must perceive the world, interact with the world, as well as with other agents and humans. It is clear that a single agent cannot perform efficiently its tasks in a large open world without cooperation with other agents. Sophisticated agent interaction mechanisms and services are needed. During interactions the agents communicate, negotiate, and form organization structures. Hence, along the development of cyberspace the new world (called agentspace), inhabited by the new intelligent creatures called software agents, is being created. It seems that the process automation in the Web makes the development of agentspace inevitable. Human users are situated at the border of the agentspace and can influence it only by their agents by delegating to them complex and time consuming tasks to perform.

Since the Internet and Web are open distributed and heterogeneous environments, agents and services can be created by different users according to different architectures. Interoperability is crucial to assure meaningful interaction, communicationand cooperation between heterogeneous agents and services. The interoperability is not only restricted to interaction and communication, but it also comprises semantic interoperability. In order to use services established by different users working in heterogeneous domains, agents have to be capable of acquiring knowledge how to use those services and for what purposes. Hence, heterogeneous agents must exchange knowledge and understand each other.

It is clear that agents can not interact meaningfully and understand each other if they have nothing in common. However, interaction interoperability must be assured first, i.e. to understand each other the agents must be able to interact. The idea of our research is to extract the absolute minimum (the very something in common) sufficient and necessary for achieving interoperability in Agentspace. According to our view this absolute minimum is agent interface to environment. The interface consists of three layers:

I. The first layer, called interaction layer, is responsible for interactions. In the first step of our project it is based on Pegaz our Mobile Agent Platform. In the final step it should go far beyond OMG MASIF and FIPA standard proposal, and be based on Java Enterprise. It assures interaction interoperability.

II. The second layer, called representation layer, consists of formal representation of Agentspace structure. Local events are the basis for the representation. It allows the agents to perceive and reason about the Agentspace in the same way.

III. The third layer, called language layer, consists of agent programming language ENTISH. A communication language is built­in, so that the agents can cooperate, form, maintain and reconfigure virtual organizations.

e-mail: [e-mail]
URL: http://www.ipipan.waw.pl/mas/stan

Non-holistic agents (Patrick De Causmaecker, KaHo Sint-Lieven)

Agents are essentially non holistic. They are small components in a larger system, communicating with each other about the subject, which concerns them. They are typically specialized in one problem domain, and do not know about other domains.

In contrast the systems in which they are to function are essentially holistic. These systems govern whole businesses, from the management layers to the cells of the production system. They are concerned with the supply chain as a whole but must be able to access a simple QC unit to obtain the data.

To obtain optionally functioning agents, these must be constructed by specialized groups. For commercial competitiveness, these groups should be able to produce agents for a diverse set of systems. They need a marketplace for their small components optimising the system functions in a specific domain.

The traditional way to arrive at such a marketplace is to impose an ontology for the domain. Another way, which we want to pursue, is to design mapping tools for systems not designed for compliance to ontology. This approach will enable agents to find their way in foreign territory. They will become useful for systems which have often been optimised over the years and should thus be disturbed as little as possible.

See also the abstract “An ontology for planning applications” (Peter Demeester)

e-mail: [e-mail]
URL: http://www2.kahosl.be/~patdc

Visual data navigation in Web documents (Mikael Jern, Advanced Visual Systems Aps and Linkoping University)

The contents in Web documents are normally restricted to static items such as text, imagery and animations. “SmartDoc” will deliver “Collaboratories” that incorporate not only text but also the entire interactive data visualisation and navigation process (Figure 2) into a Web document, allowing users and project teams to collaborate and share data, information and insight while distributed over standard or mobile Internet, using intuitive visual navigation techniques. In other words, publishing a text document on the Web is only half the story. The other half is enabling others to interact with the published result and gain insight into context that’s meaningful.

A SmartDoc contains embedded Collaboratories that give the reader full access to any discovery and insight, data navigation tools and underlying data. Visual data navigation is provided through interactive 2D and 3D Web-based visualisation components with a small footprint. The “discovery” is described in one or several snapshots providing the history of the visualisation process. These snapshots are a copy of the component’s state at the time when the snapshot was taken and allow the user to further interact from the state when the visualisation was snapped. They can be included as an image for printing the document. The underlying data or spreadsheet is either embedded in the document or accessed through a hyperlink. “What are users looking for?” is the key question guiding a SmartDoc process.

The visual data navigators “Collaboratories” is designed to be used ‘Out-of-the-Box’, developed from a true “atomic” (low-level) component infrastructure (COM and/or Java) with a small footprint suitable for Web distribution and therefore scalable and customisable to any level of expertise. A “SmartViewer” client-side plug-in, responsible for interactivity and graphics rendering, will be developed and distributed as “freeware” to allow free distribution of SmartDoc on the network. Integration and assessment of application component sharing through Web documents and a network infrastructure based on the component industry standards providing real-time data interactivity, reducing the load on the network and with zero administration client deployment.

SmartDoc scales to accommodate massive amounts of data presented in a visual format, allows full real-time interaction with on-screen presentations, and gives business users an unprecedented level of high-quality visual presentation. Our integration of visualisation and data analysis through an “atomic” component architecture combined with special data reduction components and fast scene tree rendering by the SmartViewer enables the visual data navigation of large data sets.

Of central importance to SmartDoc is the Visual User Interface (VUI) that enables the user to directly manipulate graphical objects, which respond interactively and immediately to the user’s input actions. The user interacts with both 2D and 3D objects with an immediate graphical feedback response, without the need for moving to a secondary menu window. Example of Direct Manipulation features in an interactive SmartDoc scenario: full-featured scroll bars, filter planes and other interactors, dynamically threshold, crop, filter and downsize data, link charts to identify correlations, drill down through multidimensional data sets, pan, zoom or rotate and "Tilt" interactor constrains rotations to specified angles.

Integration of our visual data navigation techniques in information and knowledge management (KM) systems is another essential goal, which is achieved through emphasis on application-oriented projects, with leading-edge commercial partners in medical, engineering and KM. In particular, the SmartDoc solution creates the means for the decision-makers to fully employ their innate ability to immediately grasp complex relations between coloured, spatial objects as a response to the ever-increasing information load.

SmartDoc’s features include:

- Dynamic multi-dimensional graphics that users can interact with in real time

- Rich set of component resources with granular control of details

- Platform/rendering library independence through SmartViewer Plug-in

- Visual User Interface - Tight integration between data and visualisation objects

- Optimised rendering based on scene tree hierarchical graphics structure

- Binning, filter, crop, sort, and aggregation to achieve good interactive response

- Drag, rotate, zoom, pick empowers users to explore data

- Data reduction integrated into visual data navigation

- Full integration with the data warehouse or spreadsheet

- Presentation graphics with axes, legends, annotation and high-resolution hard copy

- Validated through knowledge management, medical and engineering large-scale industrial environments

e-mail: [e-mail] or [e-mail]
URL: http://www.avs.com