Per keletą paskutinių metų, informacijos kiekis, apdorojamas informacinėmis technologijomis internete kiekvieną dieną, išaugo eksponentiškai. Pagrindinė problema yra ta, kad didelė dalis informacijos yra išmėtyta skirtingose, dažnai tarpusavyje nesusijusiose saugyklose, todėl tampa gana sudėtinga rasti reikiamą informaciją. Taigi, dėl padidėjusio informacijos šaltinių kiekio yra svarbu įdiegti galingas ir lengvai naudojamas informacines sistemas, kuriose būtų lengva rasti reikalingą informaciją. Tačiau paprastai tokios sistemos reikalauja pastovios portalo administratoriaus priežiūros bei informacijos atnaujinimo, kad vartotojas visada lengvai rastų pačią naujausią ir aktualiausią informaciją. Šio darbo tikslas yra padidinti informacini�� sistemų dinamiškumą, lankstumą ir automatizavimo laipsnį bei palengvinti jų priežiūrą, naudojant konfigūruojamus įvykių apdorojimo mechanizmus, kurie leistų sistemos administratoriui nustatyti ir keisti automatiškai atliekamus veiksmus. Siekiant padaryti informacines sistemas kiek įmanoma lankstesnes ir labiau automatizuotas, geriausia yra naudoti agentus. Ne paslaptis, kad agentus realizuoti duomenų bazėje verta dėl trijų priežaščių: greičio, saugumo ir patikimumo. Procedūros, realizuotos duomenų bazėje yra įvykdomos labai greitai ir neapkrauna vartotojo sąsajos. O tai labai svarbu kuriant greitas ir šiuolaikiškas interneto informacines sistemas, atitinkančias Web2 standartą. / During the last few years, amount of information, published in the internet, grew up exponentially. All that information is distributed during many different and not connected information systems, and it became difficult to find needed information easily. That’s why we need powerful but easy controlled Web information systems that would allow us to find information in more easy way. However, such systems often require maintenance and information updates from system administrators. The purpose of this work is to increase dynamism, flexibility and automation degree of information systems and to ease maintenance of such systems by implementing configurable events control mechanisms, which would allow system administrator to set up and update automatically executed actions. On purpose to make information systems configurable and automatic as much as possible, it is best to use agents. It is not a secret, that to use DBMS based agents is worth because of three reasons: rapidity, security and reliability. Procedures implemented in DBMS are executed very quickly because they do not need to be parsed, compiled or optimized every time – only during first time execution. They also do not increase loading time for web pages. Those features are very important for implementing smart internet information systems that pretend to satisfy Web2 standard requirements.

A gestão de cursos de graduação, no âmbito da coordenação de curso, está relacionada à execução de práticas que visam à melhoria da qualidade de ensino, pesquisa e extensão. No entanto, o que se observa, na maioria dos casos, é que os gestores não apresentam conhecimento aprofundado sobre os processos que estão sob sua responsabilidade, no que se refere ao fluxo de atividades e informações, devido, usualmente, a pouca qualificação ao assumirem cargos administrativos, ocorrendo uma necessidade de profissionalização da gestão. Esta tese propõe a capacitação de coordenadores de cursos de graduação, no que concerne aos seus processos de negócio, através da utilização de Jogos de Empresa. A mesma apresenta o jogo SPOIE – Simulador de Processos Organizacionais baseado em Instituições Eletrônicas, que pretende auxiliar o coordenador de curso a conhecer melhor o fluxo dos processos, os participantes envolvidos em cada processo, bem como as interações que devem ocorrer durante sua realização. A abordagem de Instituições Eletrônicas e Agentes de Software é utilizada de forma a prover mecanismos de representação das diversas interações existentes nos processos institucionais. Por fim, é apresentada uma análise da aplicação do SPOIE à coordenadores de cursos de graduação de diferentes Instituições de Educação Superior. Com a implementação da ferramenta e a aplicação realizada, percebe-se que é possível desenvolver um treinamento autônomo dos coordenadores de curso de graduação, no que concerne aos seus processos administrativos, com a abordagem supracitada. / The undergraduate programs management (course coordination) concerns in the practices implementation to qualify the teaching, research and extension. However, in most cases, the managers do not have the essential knowledge about the processes that are under their responsibility. Usually, the information flow and their activities are not so precise to the managers. A possible answer is the professor poor skills when he needs to assume an administrative position. This thesis proposes an undergraduate coordinators programs trainee. This program was focused in the business process through an Enterprise Games approach. The article presents the SPOIE - Organizational Process Simulator-based on Electronic Institutions - game, which was developed to assist the coordinator to understand the workflow, the participants involved in each case, as well as the interactions that must occur during its implementation. The software agents and the Electronic Institutions approaches are used to provide a formal representation among the interactions in the existing institutional processes. Finally, we present the SPOIE analysis held in different universities. Considering the above assertions, it is possible to conclude that the game can be used in the coordinators autonomous training of their administrative processes.

A tecnologia de agentes surge como uma solução que fornece flexibilidade e robustez para lidar com domínios dinâmicos e complexos. Tal flexibilidade pode ser alcançada através da adoção de abordagens já existentes baseadas em agentes, como a arquitetura BDI, que provê agentes com características mentais de crenças, desejos e intenções. Essa arquitetura é altamente personalizável, deixando lacunas a serem preenchidas de acordo com aplicações específicas. Uma dessas lacunas é o algoritmo de seleção de planos, responsável por selecionar um plano para ser executado pelo agente buscando atingir um objetivo, e tendo grande influência no desempenho geral do agente. Grande parte das abordagens existentes requerem considerável esforço para personalização e ajuste a fim de serem utilizadas em aplicações específicas. Nessa dissertação, propomos uma abordagem para seleção de planos apta a aprender quais planos possivelmente terão os melhores resultados, baseando-se no contexto atual e nas preferências do agente. Nossa abordagem é composta por um meta-modelo, que deve ser instanciado a fim de especificar metadados de planos, e uma técnica que usa tais metadados para aprender e predizer resultados da execução destes planos. Avaliamos nossa abordagem experimentalmente e os resultados indicam que ela é efetiva. Adicionalmente, fornecemos uma ferramenta para apoiar o processo de desenvolvimento de agentes de software baseados em nosso trabalho. Essa ferramenta permite que desenvolvedores modelem e gerem código-fonte para agentes BDI com capacidades de aprendizado. Um estudo com usuários foi realizado para avaliar os benefícios de um método de desenvolvimento baseado em agentes BDI auxiliado por ferramenta. Evidências sugerem que nossa ferramenta pode auxiliar desenvolvedores que não sejam especialistas ou que não estejam familiarizados com a tecnologia de agentes. / Agent technology arises as a solution that provides flexibility and robustness to deal with dynamic and complex domains. Such flexibility can be achieved by the adoption of existing agent-based approaches, such as the BDI architecture, which provides agents with the mental attitudes of beliefs, desires and intentions. This architecture is highly customisable, leaving gaps to be fulfilled in particular applications. One of these gaps is the plan selection algorithm that is responsible for selecting a plan to be executed by an agent to achieve a goal, having an important influence on the overall agent performance. Most existing approaches require considerable effort for customisation and adjustment to be used in particular applications. In this dissertation, we propose a plan selection approach that is able to learn plans that provide possibly best outcomes, based on current context and agent’s preferences. Our approach is composed of a meta-model, which must be instantiated to specify plan metadata, and a technique that uses such metadata to learn and predict plan outcomes. We evaluated our approach experimentally, and results indicate it is effective. Additionally, we provide a tool to support the development process of software agents based on our work. This tool allows developers to model and generate source code for BDI agents with learning capabilities. A user study was performed to assess the improvements of a tool-supported BDI-agent-based development method, and evidences suggest that our tool can help developers that are not experts or are unfamiliar with the agent technology.

A gestão de cursos de graduação, no âmbito da coordenação de curso, está relacionada à execução de práticas que visam à melhoria da qualidade de ensino, pesquisa e extensão. No entanto, o que se observa, na maioria dos casos, é que os gestores não apresentam conhecimento aprofundado sobre os processos que estão sob sua responsabilidade, no que se refere ao fluxo de atividades e informações, devido, usualmente, a pouca qualificação ao assumirem cargos administrativos, ocorrendo uma necessidade de profissionalização da gestão. Esta tese propõe a capacitação de coordenadores de cursos de graduação, no que concerne aos seus processos de negócio, através da utilização de Jogos de Empresa. A mesma apresenta o jogo SPOIE – Simulador de Processos Organizacionais baseado em Instituições Eletrônicas, que pretende auxiliar o coordenador de curso a conhecer melhor o fluxo dos processos, os participantes envolvidos em cada processo, bem como as interações que devem ocorrer durante sua realização. A abordagem de Instituições Eletrônicas e Agentes de Software é utilizada de forma a prover mecanismos de representação das diversas interações existentes nos processos institucionais. Por fim, é apresentada uma análise da aplicação do SPOIE à coordenadores de cursos de graduação de diferentes Instituições de Educação Superior. Com a implementação da ferramenta e a aplicação realizada, percebe-se que é possível desenvolver um treinamento autônomo dos coordenadores de curso de graduação, no que concerne aos seus processos administrativos, com a abordagem supracitada. / The undergraduate programs management (course coordination) concerns in the practices implementation to qualify the teaching, research and extension. However, in most cases, the managers do not have the essential knowledge about the processes that are under their responsibility. Usually, the information flow and their activities are not so precise to the managers. A possible answer is the professor poor skills when he needs to assume an administrative position. This thesis proposes an undergraduate coordinators programs trainee. This program was focused in the business process through an Enterprise Games approach. The article presents the SPOIE - Organizational Process Simulator-based on Electronic Institutions - game, which was developed to assist the coordinator to understand the workflow, the participants involved in each case, as well as the interactions that must occur during its implementation. The software agents and the Electronic Institutions approaches are used to provide a formal representation among the interactions in the existing institutional processes. Finally, we present the SPOIE analysis held in different universities. Considering the above assertions, it is possible to conclude that the game can be used in the coordinators autonomous training of their administrative processes.

A tecnologia de agentes surge como uma solução que fornece flexibilidade e robustez para lidar com domínios dinâmicos e complexos. Tal flexibilidade pode ser alcançada através da adoção de abordagens já existentes baseadas em agentes, como a arquitetura BDI, que provê agentes com características mentais de crenças, desejos e intenções. Essa arquitetura é altamente personalizável, deixando lacunas a serem preenchidas de acordo com aplicações específicas. Uma dessas lacunas é o algoritmo de seleção de planos, responsável por selecionar um plano para ser executado pelo agente buscando atingir um objetivo, e tendo grande influência no desempenho geral do agente. Grande parte das abordagens existentes requerem considerável esforço para personalização e ajuste a fim de serem utilizadas em aplicações específicas. Nessa dissertação, propomos uma abordagem para seleção de planos apta a aprender quais planos possivelmente terão os melhores resultados, baseando-se no contexto atual e nas preferências do agente. Nossa abordagem é composta por um meta-modelo, que deve ser instanciado a fim de especificar metadados de planos, e uma técnica que usa tais metadados para aprender e predizer resultados da execução destes planos. Avaliamos nossa abordagem experimentalmente e os resultados indicam que ela é efetiva. Adicionalmente, fornecemos uma ferramenta para apoiar o processo de desenvolvimento de agentes de software baseados em nosso trabalho. Essa ferramenta permite que desenvolvedores modelem e gerem código-fonte para agentes BDI com capacidades de aprendizado. Um estudo com usuários foi realizado para avaliar os benefícios de um método de desenvolvimento baseado em agentes BDI auxiliado por ferramenta. Evidências sugerem que nossa ferramenta pode auxiliar desenvolvedores que não sejam especialistas ou que não estejam familiarizados com a tecnologia de agentes. / Agent technology arises as a solution that provides flexibility and robustness to deal with dynamic and complex domains. Such flexibility can be achieved by the adoption of existing agent-based approaches, such as the BDI architecture, which provides agents with the mental attitudes of beliefs, desires and intentions. This architecture is highly customisable, leaving gaps to be fulfilled in particular applications. One of these gaps is the plan selection algorithm that is responsible for selecting a plan to be executed by an agent to achieve a goal, having an important influence on the overall agent performance. Most existing approaches require considerable effort for customisation and adjustment to be used in particular applications. In this dissertation, we propose a plan selection approach that is able to learn plans that provide possibly best outcomes, based on current context and agent’s preferences. Our approach is composed of a meta-model, which must be instantiated to specify plan metadata, and a technique that uses such metadata to learn and predict plan outcomes. We evaluated our approach experimentally, and results indicate it is effective. Additionally, we provide a tool to support the development process of software agents based on our work. This tool allows developers to model and generate source code for BDI agents with learning capabilities. A user study was performed to assess the improvements of a tool-supported BDI-agent-based development method, and evidences suggest that our tool can help developers that are not experts or are unfamiliar with the agent technology.

[pt] A escolha e materialização de índices são atividades comumente realizadas por administradores de bancos de dados (DBAs) para acelerar o processamento de aplicações de bancos de dados. Devido à complexidade da tarefa de seleção de índices e à pressão por maior produtividade sobre os profissionais que realizam sintonia, diversos trabalhos na literatura e em sistemas comerciais procuram obter ferramentas que possam apoiar o DBA na escolha dos melhores índices para uma dada carga de trabalho. Classificamos estes trabalhos como sendo de auto-sintonia local, uma vez que se focam em um problema de sintonia específico, em oposição a trabalhos de auto-sintonia global, que almejam obter um desempenho aceitável para o sistema como um todo. Esta dissertação propõe duas arquiteturas que permitem automatizar completamente a sintonia de índices. A indepedência de intervenção humana é obtida através do uso de agentes de software. A combinação de agentes com SGBDs torna os sistemas mais autônomos e capazes de auto-sintonia. Implementamos uma das arquiteturas propostas no SGBD de código fonte aberto PostgreSQL e obtivemos resultados experimentais com uma carga transacional que mostram a viabilidade de nossa abordagem. / [en] The choice and materialization of indexes are activities commonly done by database administrators to speed up database application processing. Due to the complexity of the index selection task and to the pressure for productivity increase put on tuning professionals, many works on the literature and on commercial systems seek for tools that can help the DBA choose the best indexes for a given workload. We classify these works as local self- tuning, once they are interested in a specific tuning problem, in opposition to global self-tuning work, which is targeted at obtaining acceptable performance for the system as a whole. This dissertation proposes two architectures that allow the complete automation of the index tuning task. Human intervention independence is achieved through the use of software agents. The combination of agents and DBMS makes systems more autonomous and self-tuning. We have implemented one of the proposed architectures in the open source DBMS PostgreSQL and obtained experimental results with a transactional workload that show the feasibility of our approach.

Active Documents is a technique for automating the handling and control of documents by making them a combination of service providers (mobile agents) and resources (compound documents) in the form of autonomous agents. The main focus of this solution is to provide an encapsulation of documents, including their data structures and related functionality, but also to enable documents to reflect upon themselves in respect of their computational environment, and take actions accordingly.

Ever increasing complexity of software systems, and distributed and dynamic nature of today’s enterprise level computing have initiated the demand for more self aware, flexible and robust systems, where human beings could delegate much of their work to software agents. The Semantic Web presents new opportunities for enabling, modeling, sharing and reasoning with knowledge available on the web. These opportunities are made possible through the formal representation of knowledge domains with ontologies. Semantic Web is a vision of World Wide Web (WWW) level knowledge representation system where each piece of information is equipped with well defined meaning; enabling software agents to understand and process that information. This, in turn, enables people and software agents to work in a more smooth and collaborative way. In this thesis we have first presented a detailed overview of Semantic web vision by describing its fundamental building blocks which constitutes famous layered architecture of Semantic Web. We have discussed the mile stones Semantic Web vision has achieved so far in the areas of research, education and industry and on the other hand we have presented some of the social, business and technological barriers in the way of this vision to become reality. We have also evaluated that how Semantic vision is effecting some of the current technological and research areas like Web Services, Software Agents, Knowledge Engineering and Grid Computing. In the later part of thesis we have focused on problem of ontology mapping for agents on semantic web. We have precisely defined the problem and categorized it on the basis of syntactic and semantic aspects. Finally we have produced a survey of the current state of the art in ontology mapping research. In the survey we have presented some of the selected ontology mapping systems and described their functionality on the basis of the way they approach the problem, their efficiency, effectiveness and the part of problem space they cover. We consider that the survey of current state of the art in ontology mapping will provide a solid basis for further research in this field. / Ever increasing complexity of software systems, and distributed and dynamic nature of today’s enterprise level computing have initiated the demand for more self aware, flexible and robust systems, where human beings could delegate much of their work to software agents. The Semantic Web presents new opportunities for enabling, modeling, sharing and reasoning with knowledge available on the web. These opportunities are made possible through the formal representation of knowledge domains with ontologies. Semantic Web is a vision of World Wide Web (WWW) level knowledge representation system where each piece of information is equipped with well defined meaning; enabling software agents to understand and process that information. This, in turn, enables people and software agents to work in a more smooth and collaborative way. In this thesis we have first presented a detailed overview of Semantic web vision by describing its fundamental building blocks which constitutes famous layered architecture of Semantic Web. We have discussed the mile stones Semantic Web vision has achieved so far in the areas of research, education and industry and on the other hand we have presented some of the social, business and technological barriers in the way of this vision to become reality. We have also evaluated that how Semantic vision is effecting some of the current technological and research areas like Web Services, Software Agents, Knowledge Engineering and Grid Computing. In the later part of thesis we have focused on problem of ontology mapping for agents on semantic web. We have precisely defined the problem and categorized it on the basis of syntactic and semantic aspects. Finally we have produced a survey of the current state of the art in ontology mapping research. In the survey we have presented some of the selected ontology mapping systems and described their functionality on the basis of the way they approach the problem, their efficiency, effectiveness and the part of problem space they cover. We consider that the survey of current state of the art in ontology mapping will provide a solid basis for further research in this field. / Folkparksvagen 18:01,372 40 Ronneby. Sweden

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Yes / This paper presents a critical evaluation framework for a linguistically orientated conversational software agent (CSA) (Panesar, 2017). The CSA prototype investigates the integration, intersection and interface of the language, knowledge, and speech act constructions (SAC) based on a grammatical object (Nolan, 2014), and the sub-­‐model of belief, desires and intention (BDI) (Rao and Georgeff, 1995) and dialogue management (DM) for natural language processing (NLP). A long-­‐standing issue within NLP CSA systems is refining the accuracy of interpretation to provide realistic dialogue to support the human-­‐to-­‐computer communication. This prototype constitutes three phase models: (1) a linguistic model based on a functional linguistic theory – Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) (Van Valin Jr, 2005); (2) Agent Cognitive Model with two inner models: (a) knowledge representation model employing conceptual graphs serialised to Resource Description Framework (RDF); (b) a planning model underpinned by BDI concepts (Wooldridge, 2013) and intentionality (Searle, 1983) and rational interaction (Cohen and Levesque, 1990); and (3) a dialogue model employing common ground (Stalnaker, 2002). The evaluation approach for this Java-­‐based prototype and its phase models is a multi-­‐approach driven by grammatical testing (English language utterances), software engineering and agent practice. A set of evaluation criteria are grouped per phase model, and the testing framework aims to test the interface, intersection and integration of all phase models and their inner models. This multi-­‐approach encompasses checking performance both at internal processing, stages per model and post-­‐implementation assessments of the goals of RRG, and RRG based specifics tests. The empirical evaluations demonstrate that the CSA is a proof-­‐of-­‐concept, demonstrating RRG’s fitness for purpose for describing, and explaining phenomena, language processing and knowledge, and computational adequacy. Contrastingly, evaluations identify the complexity of lower level computational mappings of NL – agent to ontology with semantic gaps, and further addressed by a lexical bridging consideration (Panesar, 2017).