Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal - Volume 10, issue 1

Authors: Bosse, Tibor | van Lambalgen, Rianne | van Maanen, Peter-Paul | Treur, Jan

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: This paper discusses and evaluates an agent model that is able to manipulate the visual attention of a human, in order to support naval crew. The agent model consists of four sub-models, including a model to reason about a subject's attention. The model was evaluated based on a practical case study which was formally analyzed and verified using automated checking tools. Results show how a human subject's attention is manipulated by adjusting luminance, based on assessment of the subject's attention. These first evaluations of the agent show a positive effect.

Keywords: Human experimentation, attention, interface agent, formal analysis

DOI: 10.3233/WIA-2012-0227

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1-17, 2012

Authors: Zhou, Liping | Huang, Houkuan | Qi, Guilin | Ma, Yue | Huang, Zhisheng | Qu, Youli

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Consistent query answering over description logic based ontologies is an important topic in ontology engineering as it can provide meaningful answers to queries posed over inconsistent ontologies. Current approaches for dealing with this problem usually consist of two steps: the first one is to extract some consistent sub-ontologies of an inconsistent ontology, and then the second one is to pose the query over these consistent sub-ontologies. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to consistent query answering for conjunctive queries over DL-Lite ontologies based on four-valued semantics, where DL-Lite is a family of tractable Description Logics (DLs). We give …an algorithm to compute answers to a query over an inconsistent DL-Lite ontology and show that it is tractable. In particular, we show that it is in PTime with respect to the size of the TBox, and is LOGSPACE with respect to the size of the ABox. Show more

Keywords: Knowledge representation, description logics, inconsistency handling, paraconsistent reasoning, query answering

DOI: 10.3233/WIA-2012-0228

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 19-31, 2012

Authors: Kobayashi, Masao | Ito, Takayuki | Ando, Satoshi

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Internet auctions are more than just electronic commerce; they have also become crucial for actual commerce. Because such activity occurs on the Internet, we need a way to determine people's reputations for such commerce. Thus reputation mechanisms are being developed and are widely being used. Most existing reputation mechanisms are based on simple numerical evaluation mechanisms in which users provide feedback as ratings, stars, and evaluation values that usually range from 0 to 5. These scores are totaled, and this sum is assumed to represent the user's reputation. The following problems are obvious: First, the score total might lack or …overlook some important information. Second, there is no score propagation of values, even if relations exist among people on the network. On the other hand, for example, reputation mechanisms for websites, including PageRank and HITS, utilize the characteristics of links (hyperlinks) to evaluate a node (a page) by the weights on it (the page). We believe trading networks have similar characteristics, enabling us to build more effective reputation mechanisms. In this paper we investigate several new reputation mechanisms called Auction Network Trusts (ANTs) for defining user reputations in trading networks. We propose five types of ANTs: ANT(HITS), tANT, rANT, mANT, and dANT. Our aim is to analyze these new mechanisms with actual online auction datasets to determine whether they can effectively utilize the trading links between sellers and buyers. We show our findings of these new reputation mechanisms from our current experimental results. These findings are well-known abstract-level properties in the field of reputation mechanisms. By using ANT mechanisms, we can find such findings in real world auction data. What we can get by the ANT mechanism is technically sound, and ANTs can be applicable to real world auction data. Show more

Keywords: Reputation mechanism, trading network, internet auction

DOI: 10.3233/WIA-2012-0229

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 33-47, 2012

Authors: Ren, Fenghui | Zhang, Minjie | Fulcher, John

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Electronic Commerce has been a very significant commercial phenomenon in recent years, and autonomous agents are widely adopted by business or individuals in electronic marketplaces to fulfill time consuming tasks in trading. Agent negotiation mechanisms are usually applied between conflicted agents in order to reach a mutually beneficial agreement. Prediction of trading agents' strategies and behaviours in negotiation is a very significant research topic in agent negotiation. By employing the prediction results on opponents' possible strategies and behaviours during a negotiation, trading agents can plan and perform corresponding strategies in order to maximize their own profits. Significant achievements have been …made on this topic. However, most existing approaches are based on machine learning mechanisms, which may fail to capture opponents' behaviours in open and dynamic electronic marketplaces. In this paper, two agent behaviour expectation approaches are introduced to help trading agents to capture opponents' potential behaviours during a negotiation in complex e-marketplaces. (i) The regression analysis approach focuses on illustrating the main trends of opponents' trading behaviours; (ii) the vector analysis approach pays more attention to identifying opponents' detailed negotiation strategies. The experimental results show the efficiency and efficacy of the two proposed approaches in open and dynamic negotiation environments. Show more

Keywords: Agent negotiation, e-marketplace, agent behaviour prediction

DOI: 10.3233/WIA-2012-0230

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 49-63, 2012

Authors: Goyal, Madhu | Ma, Jun

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: To be successful in Continuous Double Auctions, agents must be capable of adapting to continuously changing bidding prices. This paper presents a novel fuzzy attitude-based bidding strategy (FA-Bid), which employs a dual assessment technique i.e. the assessment of multiple attributes of the goods as well as the assessment of the agent's attitude (eagerness) to procure an item in an automated auction. The assessment of attributes adopts the fuzzy sets technique to handle the uncertainty of the bidding process, as well as using the heuristic rules to determine the attitudes of bidding agents in simulated auctions to procure goods. The overall …assessment is used to determine a price range from which the best one is selected as the new bid. Show more

Keywords: Software agents, fuzzy sets, automated auctions, attitudes, bidding strategy

DOI: 10.3233/WIA-2012-0231

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 65-74, 2012

Authors: Wang, Yan | Lu, Jianguo | Liang, Jie | Chen, Jessica | Liu, Jiming

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of selecting queries to efficiently crawl a deep web data source using a set of sample documents. Crawling deep web is the process of collecting data from search interfaces by issuing queries. One of the major challenges in crawling deep web is the selection of the queries so that most of the data can be retrieved at a low cost. We propose to learn a set of queries from a sample of the data source. To verify that the queries selected from a sample also produce a good result for the entire data source, we …carried out a set of experiments on large corpora including Gov2, newsgroups, wikipedia and Reuters. We show that our sampling-based method is effective by empirically proving that 1) The queries selected from samples can harvest most of the data in the original database; 2) The queries with low overlapping rate in samples will also result in a low overlapping rate in the original database; and 3) The size of the sample and the size of the terms from where to select the queries do not need to be very large. Compared with other query selection methods, our method obtains the queries by analyzing a small set of sample documents, instead of learning the next best query incrementally from all the documents matched with previous queries. Show more

Keywords: Deep web, hidden web, invisible web, crawling, query selection, sampling, set covering, web service

DOI: 10.3233/WIA-2012-0232

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 75-88, 2012

Article Type: Other

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 89-89, 2012

Authors: Vercouter, Laurent | Maret, Pierre

Article Type: Research Article

DOI: 10.3233/WIA-2012-0233

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 91-92, 2012

Authors: Leprovost, Damien | Abrouk, Lylia | Gross-Amblard, David

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Being a Community manager is an emerging employment in social Web companies. His or her role is to monitor communities on a devoted social website, in order to understand new trends or behaviours. He or she also has to discover and attract new potential users of the website in external resources like web forums, that are not necessarily on the same topics nor explicitly defined. In this paper we propose a scalable protocol to monitor on-line communications, like web forums, walls or twits. We provide an analysis method to extract implicit communities and user interests based on the semantics of …data exchange and the structure of communications. The method is parameterized by a target vocabulary expressed as an ontology, in order to focus on relevant communities. Show more

Keywords: Semantic analysis, forums, communities, social networks, ontologies

DOI: 10.3233/WIA-2012-0234

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 93-103, 2012

Authors: Krupa, Yann | Vercouter, Laurent

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Contextual Integrity has been proposed to define privacy in an unusual way. Most approaches take into account a sensitivity level or a “privacy circle”: the information is said to be either private or public and to be constrained to a given group of agents, e.g. “my friends”, when private. In the opposite, Contextual Integrity states that any information transmitted can make this transmission a privacy violation depending on its context. We use this theory to develop a novel framework that one can use in an open and decentralized virtual community to socially enforce privacy. This paper proposes the PrivaCIAS framework, …in which privacy constraints are formally described to be used to detect privacy violations according to the Contextual Integrity theory. This PrivaCIAS framework provides social control to agents that handle the information, so that deceiving agents are excluded from the system. Show more

Keywords: Privacy, contextual integrity, virtual communities, multiagent systems, open decentralized networks

DOI: 10.3233/WIA-2012-0235

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 105-116, 2012