A Knowledge Processing System for Data Service Network Design

Abstract

The knowledge reuse and fusion/transformation system (KRAFT) is research prototype software for combining and transforming constraint-based knowledge. It is being developed in collaboration with BT by three UK universities — Aberdeen, Cardiff and Liverpool. The KRAFT system is designed to help its users to locate relevant data and constraint knowledge held in distributed heterogeneous data and knowledge bases, convert this knowledge to generate a required composite problem specification, and exploit appropriate constraint solvers in solving the specified problem. The system architecture utilises intelligent software agent technology in the form of wrapper, facilitator and mediator agents for co-operative knowledge processing, and also a shared data model and a shared ontology as the basis for knowledge exchange. This paper describes the application of KRAFT in the design of data service networks for BT. It presents, in turn, an introduction including an overview of the KRAFT system architecture, a description of the BT network design test application scenario, the application of KRAFT to this scenario, conclusions and further work.