Cooperative intelligent information system: extending global schemata

Research in distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) has produced many architectures such as the blackboard model or more general decentralised system. Most of these models fall short in providing an open platform to integrate various heterogeneous knowledge and data sources. Federated distributed databases are used to access multiple databases in a distributed system. The authors present a cooperative and intelligent architecture which has the advantage of providing an open platform to integrate various heterogeneous information and knowledge sources in a way that is flexible and able to adjust to changes. In the most general case it would integrate expert systems (ES), knowledge based systems (KBS), deductive and other databases, various heterogeneous data stores and `the user´. The latter can be accessed by an intelligent human agent. The agents can be implemented in form of `interfaces´ to the distributed systems. These interfaces are practically agents that know how to interact with humans